Throne of the Crescent Moon

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.

Chapter 1

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.

He raised the bowl to his lips and sipped, relishing the piquant sweetness. He heard Yehyeh’s shuffling approach, smelled the pastries his friend was bringing. This, Adoulla thought, was life as Beneficent God intended it.

Yehyeh set his own teabowl and a plate of pastries on the stone table with two loud clinks, then slid his wiry frame onto the bench beside Adoulla. Adoulla had long marveled that the cross-eyed, limping teahouse owner could whisk and clatter bowls and platters about with such efficiency and so few shatterings. A matter of practice, he supposed. Adoulla knew better than most that habit could train a man to do anything.

Yehyeh smiled broadly, revealing the few teeth left to him.

He gestured at the sweets. “Almond nests—the first of the day, before I’ve even opened my doors. And God save us from fat friends who wake us too early!”

Adoulla waved a hand dismissively. “When men reach our age, my friend, we should wake before the sun. Sleep is too close to death for us.”

Yehyeh grunted. “So says the master of the half-day nap! And why this dire talk again, huh? You’ve been even gloomier than usual since your last adventure.”

Adoulla plucked up an almond nest and bit it in half. He chewed loudly and swallowed, staring into his teabowl while Yehyeh waited for his reply. Finally Adoulla spoke, though he did not look up.

“Gloomy? Hmph. I have cause to be. Adventure, you say? A fortnight ago I was face-to-face with a living bronze statue that was trying to kill me with an axe. An axe, Yehyeh!” He shook his head at his own wavering tea-reflection. “Threescore years old, and still I’m getting involved in such madness. Why?” he asked, looking up.

Yehyeh shrugged. “Because God the All-Knowing made it so. You’ve faced such threats and worse before, my friend. You may look like the son of the bear who screwed the buzzard, but you’re the only real ghul hunter left in this whole damned-by-God city, O Great and Virtuous Doctor.”

Yehyeh was baiting him by using the pompous honorifics ascribed to a physician. The ghul hunters had shared the title of “Doctor” but little else with the “Great and Virtuous” menders of the body. No leech-wielding charlatan of a physician could stop the fanged horrors that Adoulla had battled.

“How would you know what I look like, Six Teeth? You whose crossed eyes can see nothing but the bridge of your own nose!” Despite Adoulla’s dark thoughts, trading the familiar insults with Yehyeh felt comfortable, like a pair of old, well made sandals. He brushed almond crumbs from his fingers onto his spotless kaftan. Magically, the crumbs and honey spots slid from his blessedly unstainable garment to the ground.

“You are right, though,” he continued, “I have faced worse. But this… this…” Adoulla slurped his tea. The battle against the bronzeman had unnerved him. The fact that he had needed his assistant Raseed’s sword arm to save him was proof that he was getting old. Even more disturbing was the fact that he’d been daydreaming of death during the fight. He was tired. And when one was hunting monsters, tired was a step away from dead. “The boy saved my fat ass. I’d be dead if not for him.” It wasn’t easy to admit.

“Your young assistant? No shame in that. He’s a dervish of the Order! That’s why you took him in, right? For his forked sword—‘cleaving the right from the wrong’ and all that?”

“It’s happened too many times of late,” Adoulla said. “I ought to be retired. Like Dawoud and his wife.” He sipped and then was quiet for a long moment. “I froze, Yehyeh. Before the boy came to my rescue. I froze. And do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking that I would never get to do this again—sit at this table with my face over a bowl of good cardamom tea.”

Yehyeh bowed his head, and Adoulla thought his friend’s eyes might be moist. “You would have been missed. But the point is that you did make it back here, praise be to God.”

“Aye. And why, Six Teeth, don’t you say to me ‘Now stay home, you old fart?’ That is what a real friend would say to me!”

“There are things you can do, O Buzzard-Beaked Bear, that others can’t. And people need your help. God has called you to this life. What can I say that will change that?” Yehyeh’s mouth tightened and his brows drew down. “Besides, who says home is safe? That madman the Falcon Prince is going to burn this city down around our ears any day now, mark my words.”

They had covered this subject before. Yehyeh had little use for the treasonous theatrics of the mysterious master thief who called himself the Falcon Prince. Adoulla agreed that the “Prince” was likely mad, but he still found himself approving of the would-be usurper. The man had stolen a great deal from the coffers of the Khalif and rich merchants, and much of that money found its way into the hands of Dhamsawaat’s poorest—sometimes hand delivered by the Falcon Prince himself.

Yehyeh sipped his tea and went on. “He killed another of the Khalif’s headsmen last week, you know. That’s two now.” He shook his head. “Two agents of the Khalif’s justice, murdered.”

Adoulla snorted. “ ‘Khalif’s justice’? Now there are two words that refuse to share a tent! That piece of shit isn’t half as smart a ruler as his father was, but he’s twice as cruel. Is it justice to let half the city starve while that greedy son of a whore sits on his brocaded cushions eating peeled grapes? Is it justice to—”

Yehyeh rolled his crossed eyes, a grotesque sight. “No speeches, please. No wonder you like the villain—you’ve both got big mouths! But I tell you, my friend, I’m serious. This city can’t hold a man like that and one like the new Khalif at the same time. We are heading for battle in the streets. Another civil war.”

Adoulla scowled. “May it please God to forbid it.”

Yehyeh stood up, stretched, and clapped Adoulla on the back. “Aye. May All-Merciful God put old men like us quietly in our graves before this storm hits.” The cross-eyed man did not look particularly hopeful of this. He squeezed Adoulla’s shoulder. “Well. I’ll let you get back to your book, O Gamal of the Golden Glasses.”

Adoulla groaned. Back when he’d been a street brawling youth on Dead Donkey Lane, he himself had used the folktale hero’s name to tease boys who read. He’d learned better in the decades since. He placed a hand protectively over his book. “You should not contemn poetry, my friend. There’s wisdom in these lines. About life, death, one’s own fate.”

“No doubt!” Yehyeh aped the act of reading a nonexistent book in the air before him, running a finger over the imaginary words and speaking in a grumble that was an imitation of Adoulla’s own. “O, how hard it is to be so fat! O, how hard it is to have so large a nose! O Beneficent God, why do the children run a-screaming when I come a-walking?”

Before Adoulla could come up with a rejoinder on the fear Yehyeh’s own crossed eyes inspired in children, the teahouse owner limped off, chuckling obscenities to himself.

His friend was right about one thing: Adoulla was, praise God, alive and back home—back in the Jewel of Abassen, the city with the best tea in the world. Alone again at the long stone table, he sat and sipped and watched early morning Dhamsawaat come to life and roll by. A thick necked cobbler walked past, two long poles strung with shoes over his shoulder. A woman from Rughal-ba strode by, a bouquet in her hands, and the long trail of her veil flapping behind. A lanky young man with a large book in his arms and patches in his kaftan moved idly eastward.

As he stared out onto the street, Adoulla’s nightmare suddenly reasserted itself with such force that he could not move or speak. He was walking—wading—through Dhamsawaat’s streets, waist high in a river of blood. His kaftan was soiled with gore and filth. Everything was tinted red—the color of the Traitorous Angel. An unseen voice, like a jackal howling human words, clawed at his mind. And all about him the people of Dhamsawaat lay dead and disemboweled.

Name of God!

He forced himself to breathe. He watched the men and women on the Mainway, very much alive and going about their business. There were no rivers of blood. No jackal howls. His kaftan was clean.

Adoulla took another deep breath. Just a dream. The world of sleep invading my days, he told himself. I need a nap.

He took a second-to-last slurp of tea, savoring all of the subtle spices that Yehyeh layered beneath the cardamom. He shook off his grim thoughts as best he could and stretched his legs for the long walk home.

He was still stretching when he saw his assistant, Raseed, emerge from the alley on the teahouse’s left. Raseed strode toward him, dressed as always in the impeccable blue silk habit of the Order of Dervishes. The holy warrior pulled a large parcel behind him, something wrapped in gray rags.

No, not something. Someone. A long-haired little boy of perhaps eight years. With blood on his clothes. O please, no. Adoulla’s stomach clenched up. Merciful God help me, what now? Adoulla reached deep and somehow found the strength to set down his teabowl and rise to his feet.

Chapter 2

Adoulla watched Raseed weave between the teahouse tables, pulling the child gently along. They came to a halt before him, their backs to the Mainway’s throng of people. Raseed bowed his blue-turbaned head. Looking more closely, Adoulla did not think the frightened-looking, long-haired child was wounded. The blood on his clothing seemed to be someone else’s.

“God’s peace, Doctor,” said Raseed. “This is Faisal. He needs our help.” The dervish’s hand rested on the hilt of the curved, fork-tipped sword at his hip. He stood five lithe feet, not much bigger than the child beside him. His fine-boned yellow features were delicate and highlighted by tilted eyes. But Adoulla knew better than anyone that Raseed’s slender frame and clean-shaven face hid a zealous killer’s skill.

“God’s peace, boy. And to you, Faisal. What is the problem?” he asked the dervish.

Raseed’s expression was grim. “The boy’s parents have been murdered.” He darted his dark eyes at Faisal but made no attempt to soften his tone. “With apologies, Doctor, my knowledge is insufficient. But from Faisal’s description, I believe ghuls attacked the boy’s family. Also—”

Two porters passed, each shouting at the other to go screw a pickle barrel, and the soft-spoken dervish’s words were drowned out. “What was that?” Adoulla asked.

“I said that I was sent here by… Faisal is…” He hesitated.

“What? What is it?” Adoulla asked.

“Faisal’s aunt is known to you, Doctor. It was she who brought him to your townhouse.” Adoulla looked down at Faisal, but the child said nothing.

“Stop this mysterious monkeyshit, you stuttering dervish! Who is the child’s aunt?”

Raseed’s birdlike mouth tightened in distaste. “Mistress Miri Almoussa is the boy’s aunt.”

God damn me.

“Her courier brought the boy and this note, Doctor.” He drew a rolled piece of rough paper from his blue silk tunic and handed it over.

“ ‘God’s peace be with you’?” Adoulla read the words aloud, a bit incredulous. Such a passionless, formulaic closing from his old heart’s-flame! Mistress Miri Almoussa, Seller of Silks and Sweets. Known to a select few as Miri of the Hundred Ears. Adoulla pictured her, middle-aged and still able to fill him with more lust than a girl of half her years, sitting in her brothel office among a hundred scraps of paper and a half dozen letter pigeons.

It was true that their last meeting had not been a happy one. But was she really so fed up with him that, even in such a dire situation, she had sent a note instead of coming herself? The rosewater-scented memory of her threatened to overwhelm him, but he shoved it to the side. He needed analysis now, not heartsick nostalgia.

The dried blood on Faisal’s rough spun shirt must have been from one of his parents. Miri had not even wasted time changing the child’s clothes before sending him over. “So you are Miri’s grand-nephew? I remember her speaking of a niece who lived out near the marshdocks.”

“Yes, Doctor.” The boy’s tone was hard and flat—the voice of one who has refused to let his mind absorb what his eyes have seen.

“And why, Faisal, have you come all the way to the city for help? There’s a large watchmen’s barracks at the marshdocks—the Khalif has treasure-houses there, after all. Did you not tell the watchmen what happened?”

The child’s features twisted with bitterness that belied his, perhaps, ten years. “I tried. But the watchmen don’t listen to marsh boys. They don’t care what happens outside the treasure house walls, long as the Khalif’s gold and gemthread are safe. My mama told me that my Auntie Miri in the city had a friend who was a real ghul hunter, like in the stories. So I come to Dhamsawaat.”

Adoulla smiled sadly. “Very little in life is like the stories, Faisal.”

“But my mama… and my Da…” Faisal’s tough marsh boy mask slipped and tears fell.

Adoulla was not at his ease with children. He stroked the boy’s long black hair, hoping this was the right thing to do. “I know, little one, I know. But I need you to be strong right now, Faisal. I need you to tell me exactly what happened.”

Adoulla sat back down, seating the child opposite him. Raseed remained standing, hand on hilt, his tilted eyes watching the crowds that walked past the teahouse.

Faisal told his story. Adoulla sorted through babbling, sobs, and the exaggerations of fear, trying to isolate useful information. There was little to isolate. Faisal lived with his parents in the marshes a day’s ride from the city. While out spearfishing with another family they had been set upon by hissing, gray-skinned monsters, man-shaped but not human. Bone ghuls, unless Adoulla missed his guess—strong as half a dozen men and as hard to kill, with gruesome claws besides. Faisal had fled, but not before he’d seen the ghuls start to eat the heart muscle of his still living parents.

The blood on his shirt was his father’s. Faisal was the only one who’d escaped. Adoulla had seen grisly things in his work, but sometimes it was worse seeing the effect such things had on others.

“I ran away and left them…. Mama said ‘run’ and I did! It’s my fault they’re dead!” He began bawling again. “My fault!”

Adoulla wrapped an arm awkwardly around the boy. He felt like a great ape coddling a new hatched chick. “It is not your fault, Faisal. A man made those ghuls. Almighty God willing, we will find this man and keep his creatures from hurting others. Now I need you to tell me just once more what happened—everything, every detail you can remember.”

Adoulla extracted another telling of the incident. He didn’t like doing it—making the child relive this horror twice and thrice over. But he had to, if he was going to do his job. Frightened people often remembered things falsely, even when they meant to be honest. He listened for new details and inconsistencies, not because he distrusted the boy, but because people never remembered things exactly the same way twice.

Still, Adoulla found Faisal a better source of information than most grown men who’d laid eyes on a ghul. He was a marshman after all, and they were tough and observant folk. No people—not even the Badawi of the desert—lived closer to starvation. Adoulla could remember Miri’s disgust a dozen years ago when she’d learned that her niece was marrying a marshman. “What is there for her out there?” she’d asked Adoulla over a game of bakgam. He had been unable to answer; he was as thoroughly a city creature as she was. But there was no denying that where life itself depended on spearing quick fish and raising fragile golden rice, attentiveness flourished.

Faisal’s retellings informed Adoulla that three creatures had attacked, and that no man had been visible at the time. Adoulla turned to Raseed. “Three of the things! Commanded outside of the line of sight. This is not the usual half-dinar magus, heady with the power of his first ghul-raising. Troubling.”

The Heavenly Chapters decreed that ghul-makers were damned to the Lake of Flame. The Chapters spoke of an ancient, corrupted age when wicked men commanded whole legions of the things from miles away. But those times were past. In all his years of ghul hunting, Adoulla had never seen a man make more than two of the monsters at a time—and this always from a few hundred yards away at most. “Troubling,” he said again.

He instructed Raseed to cut a small scrap from the boy’s scarlet-stained shirt. Other than the name of its maker, the blood of a ghul’s victim was the best component for a tracking spell. The creatures themselves would likely prove easy enough to find. But he would need to head closer to the scene of the slaying, and get away from the city’s teeming, confusing life-energies, to cast an effective tracking spell.

Adoulla only prayed that he would be able to find the creatures before they fed again. As the silent prayer echoed in his mind, he felt a weary determination rising in his heart. There was more bloody work to be done. O God, why must it be me every time? Adoulla had paid his “fare for the festival of this world,” as the poets say, many times over. It was some younger man’s turn to do this.

But there was no younger man that could do it without him, Adoulla knew. He had fought beside many men, but had never had the wherewithal to train another in the ways of his near-dead order—had never been able to bring himself to set another on his own thankless road. Two years ago he’d reluctantly agreed to take Raseed as an assistant. But while the boy’s martial powers were unmatched, he had no talent for invocations. He was an excellent apprentice in the ends of ghul hunting, but his means to those ends were his own, and they were different than Adoulla’s.

In ages past, the makers and the hunters of ghuls alike were more plentiful. Old Doctor Boujali, Aduolla’s own mentor, had explained it early in Adoulla’s apprenticeship. It’s an almost dead art I’m teaching you here, young one, he had said. Once the ghul-makers ran rampant over God’s great earth, and more of our order were needed. These days… well, few men use ghuls to prey on one another. The Khalif has his soldiers and his court magi to keep what he calls order. And if a few fiendish men still follow the Traitorous Angel’s ways and gain their power through the death and dismembering of poor people, well, that’s of little concern to those who rule from the Palace of the Crescent Moon. Even in other lands the ghul hunters are not what we once were. The Soo Pashas have their mercenaries and their Glorious Guardians. The High Sultaan of Rughal-ba controls those few who still know our ways. They are part of his Heavenly Army, whether they wish it or not. Our work is not like the heroism of the old stories. No vast armies of abominations stand before us. These days we save a fishmonger here, a porter’s wife there. But it is still God’s work. Never forget that.

But in the many years since Doctor Boujali had first said these words to Adoulla it sometimes seemed that the scale arm was swinging back in the old direction. Adoulla and his friends had dispatched enough fiendish creatures over the decades to make him suspect that the old threats were starting to regain a foothold on God’s great earth. Yet He had not deigned to raise scores of new ghul hunters. Instead, for reasons known only to He Who Holds All Answers, God had seen fit to pile trouble after trouble onto the stooped shoulders of a few old folks. One day—one day very soon—Adoulla feared his spine would snap under the strain.

Why was Adoulla made to bear so big a burden alone? When would others learn to defend themselves from the servants of the Traitorous Angel? What would happen after he was gone? Adoulla had asked Almighty God these questions ten thousand times in his life, but He Who Holds All Answers had never deigned to respond. It seemed that Adoulla’s gifts were always just enough to keep the creatures he faced in check, but he wondered again why God had made his life in this world such a tiring, lonely chore.

Still, as tired of life as he sometimes felt, and as foolish as he found most men to be, he could never quite manage to leave people to their cruelest fate. He drew in a resigned breath, let it out again, and stood. His teabowl was empty. Digging into the seemingly endless folds of his moonlight white kaftan, Adoulla drew forth a copper fals and slapped it onto the table.

As if he’d been summoned by the sound, Yehyeh appeared. He exchanged God’s peaces with Raseed, then cast a cross-eyed frown at Faisal’s bloody clothes. But all he said as he and Adoulla embraced and kissed on both cheeks in the familiar parting gesture was, “Stay safe, Buzzard Beak.”

“I will try, Six Teeth,” Adoulla replied. He turned to Raseed and Faisal. “Come on, you two.”

Raseed stepped silently out from where he leaned against the teahouse wall. It was like watching a shadow come to life and peel itself from the sandstone. They joined the flow of the Mainway, Adoulla and the dervish keeping the child between them.

At the corner Adoulla waved over Camelback, a porter he’d known for years. Camelback was nearly a foot shorter than Adoulla but had shoulders enough for two men.

The men exchanged God’s peaces and cheek kisses. Adoulla pressed a coin into the porter’s palm. “Take Faisal here to Mistress Miri Almoussa’s place in the Singers’ Quarter.” He had to speak loudly to be heard over a braying donkey half a block ahead.

The child panicked all over again. “But… but… don’t you need me to come with you, Doctor? To show you the way?”

“No, child,” Adoulla said, leaning down. “I will use my magic to track the ghuls. You would slow us down. And, besides, I will not put you in danger.”

“I’m not afraid.”

Looking into his eyes, Adoulla believed him. If Faisal came across the ghuls again, he would not run a second time. And that could only mean a little boy’s death. Adoulla had seen such before. He had no desire to bear witness to it again.

“I promise you, Faisal, we will avenge your family. But your mother gave everything so that you could live. Do not throw that away so quickly. You will make her happiest by being a good boy and living a long life.” Adoulla paused, letting the words sink in.

The child nodded, though he was clearly unconvinced. He went with Camelback, and they were soon swallowed by the crowd. Adoulla turned to Raseed only to find the dervish glaring at him.

“What? Why are you scowling so, boy?” Somewhere behind them on the street someone dropped something that broke loudly and gave off a vinegared scent.

Raseed glanced back, glanced at Adoulla, and sniffed. “You just sent a child barely ten back to a house of ill repute.” He pursed his thin lips in disapproval.

The little holy man could be so thick sometimes. “I sent him to his Auntie’s house. To one of the few places in the city where a penniless little orphan would be well-treated even were he not related to the proprietress. Miri and her girls always have need of an errand boy or two.”

“ ‘O believer! If a man asks you to chose between virtue and your brother, choose virtue!’ ” Raseed quoted from the Heavenly Chapters. “There are charitable orders where the boy would be better served. To grow up among such degenerate women is…”

Adoulla felt his fire rise at the boy’s words. The last time he’d seen her—almost two years ago now—Miri Almoussa had made it clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him. Nonetheless, he’d be damned if he’d stand for her being insulted. He made his voice dangerous. “About whom exactly are you speaking, boy?”

The dervish clearly thought better of elaborating. His blue turban bobbed in a bow. “My apologies, Doctor. I meant only that a virtuous upbringing in one of the city’s orphan halls, where the boy could learn a trade, would—”

“Would doom the boy to six nights a week of under-the-sheets upbringing by some drunken ‘Godly servant of children.’ They’d leave him alone on Prayersday. Hmph. He’d learn a trade all right.”

“Doctor! I can’t believe—” Raseed’s words were cut off when a big bull of a woman shouldered her way between the pair, cursing them for standing idle in the street. Adoulla started walking again, and the dervish followed.

“Please, boy,” Adoulla said, “spare me your solemn protestations regarding that which you know nothing of. He’d be more likely to become a whore in one of those terror houses than he would if he’d been living at Miri’s from the day of his birth. In my orphan days, I dodged such places for the dungeons they were. Nothing’s changed. Now!” Adoulla half-shouted, clapping his hands together in an effort to disperse the argument. “I need to go home to gather some spell supplies. Then we head out of the city. Let’s get moving. If we linger too long, I’ll end up thinking better of this.”

They quickened their pace as much as the press of people would allow. The sun shone clearly as they stepped out of the street and its building-shadows and crossed the open space of Angels’ Square. Adoulla did not stop and marvel yet again at the almost-living expressions on the ancient statuary faces of the Ministering Angels. He did, however, push brusquely through a knot of oddly dressed, gawking city-visitors who stood staring crane-necked at the lifelike marble work. Bumpkins! Adoulla griped to himself, but he didn’t really blame them.

Even when civil war had wracked the city two hundred years earlier, Angels’ Square had been a sanctuary of sorts. All sides had agreed to shed no blood on its stones. Though crowded cheek-by-jowl with refuge-seekers, one could taste the peace of the place in the air, or so the historians and passed-down stories said. Today, aside from the pack of sightseekers, the square was largely quiet. If there weren’t such grim work before him, Adoulla thought he might have felt some of the old peace. Instead, his thoughts were on tracking spells and a child’s bloodied clothing.

He and Raseed left Angels’ Square behind for grimy Gruel Lane. On the Khalif’s maps, the narrow, dirty street that led from the Square to Adoulla’s neighborhood bore the name of some long-dead ruler. But for centuries Dhamsawaatis had called it Gruel Lane for its poverty and its inhospitable inns. Avoiding the occasional puddle of piss, Adoulla made it to the corner that marked the border of his rough neighborhood, the ironically named Scholars’ Quarter.

Pious old Munesh, with his wisps of white hair and his roasted-nut stall, stood on the corner agitating fire-heated trays of sugared almonds and salted pistachios. The aroma made Adoulla’s mouth water. He stopped to buy a handful of roasted pistachios.

“Doctor!” Raseed had been silent for much of their walk home, and Adoulla had almost forgotten he was there. The dervish was clearly scandalized by the delay. Adoulla wished he were young enough to believe that zeal and an urge to combat monsters were enough to fill one’s stomach. But the years had taught him otherwise, and he had a long day ahead of him.

“I’ve had only half a breakfast, boy. I need sustenance to think clearly, and a handful of moments here will matter little enough. The Heavenly Chapters say ‘A starving man builds no palaces.’ ”

“They also say ‘For the starving man, prayer is better than food.’ ”

Adoulla gave up. He grunted to Raseed, thanked Munesh and walked on, cracking shells and munching noisily.

His assistant was a true dervish of the Order, truer than most of the hypocritical peacocks who wore the blue silks. He had spent years hardening his diminutive body, his only purpose to be a fitter and fitter weapon of God. To Adoulla’s mind, it was an unhealthy approach to life for a boy of seven and ten. True, God had granted Raseed more than human powers; armed with the forked sword of his order, he was nearly invincible. Even without the sword the boy could take on half a dozen men at once. Adoulla had seen him do it. But the fact that he had never so much as kissed a girl lessened Adoulla’s respect for him considerably.

Still, it was Raseed’s pious discipline that made him such a good battle companion. A man’s character was most clearly displayed in the uses he put his gifts to. In his forty years as a ghul hunter, Adoulla had seen a man jump twenty feet into the air and had watched a girl turn water into fire. He had seen a warrior split himself into two warriors, then four. He had watched as an old lady made trees walk.

What he had seen people do with such powers varied as much, or as little, as people themselves. Their motivations covered the same range of reasons all men and women did things. Occasionally they helped other people and made sacrifices. More often, they acted selfishly and did wrong to their fellow children of God. Raseed, for his part, always went the first route.

A neighbor’s child hollered Adoulla’s name and waved in greeting from across the packed-dirt street. Clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts and slurping the last bits of salt and pistachio from his fingers, Adoulla waved back and stepped onto his own block.

He passed the small sandstone shop that belonged to his friends and ex-traveling companions, Dawoud and Litaz, a Soo couple who had lived in the city for decades. Apparently they were not home—the shop’s cedar shutters were drawn tight. Too bad. Adoulla would never have asked his retired friends to accompany him on this ghul hunt, but Litaz had kept up with her alkhemy, and it would have been nice to borrow one of her remarkable freezing solutions or explosive preparations to aid in his work.

But it was Idesday, so Adoulla guessed that the couple would be spending the day and perhaps the night with friends at the Western Market, where traders from the Soo Republic swept in once a month with ivory, gold, and the yam candies that Litaz always had on hand to remind herself of home.

Finally, he and Raseed reached the pale stone townhouse that had been Adoulla’s thin slice of Dhamsawaat for twenty-odd years. Adoulla opened the white-painted wood door of the townhouse and stepped through the gently arched doorway, the dervish following.

It was no palace. But it was much better than the hovels that were his origin and likely inheritance as an orphan on Dead Donkey Lane. That he’d been able to buy the building at all had been due to the vagaries of his calling, which for once had worked to his advantage. Many years ago he had, with Dawoud and Litaz, fought a golden snake forty feet long, with huge rubies for eyes—an ancient monster created in the days of the Faroes of Kem and awakened by a greedy man’s digging. Just looking at the glittering serpent caused magical fear in even a stout heart, and it had already slain a squadron of the old Khalif’s watchmen. But Adoulla and his friends had ambushed the creature and drained its animating magic.

The serpent had collapsed as they’d watched, crumbling into huge piles of gold dust. Near thirty years later, Adoulla could still smilingly recall the sound of those fist-sized rubies falling to the ground. I am now a rich man, he remembered thinking as he and his friends had gleefully scooped gold dust into their pouches and sacks, doing little dances of celebration all the while.

It had been a treasure to rival those of Dhamsawaat’s great merchants. And though, over the past twenty-odd years, his calling had forced him to undertake several expensive journeys to distant places, he still had a respectable sum. He had no wife or children to keep, after all. His expenses had increased two years ago when Raseed, who had aided Adoulla admirably in a ghul hunt, had asked to stay on as an assistant. But even that had not cost him much, as the boy ate such simple fare.

Adoulla set to gathering his things. The marshes were less than a day’s ride west by mule, so they’d need little in the way of traveling supplies. But there were preparations to be made for any ghul hunt. He slung a large, worn satchel of brown calfskin over his shoulder and moved about the townhouse’s book-and box-cluttered rooms. As he went, he stuffed the bag with things collected from shelves, tabletops and undusted corners. A punk of aloewood. A box of scripture-engraved needles. A vial of dried mint leaves. Pouches and packets, scraps of paper and bright little bottles wrapped in cloth.

In a quarter hour’s time he was ready to go, and Raseed was already standing by the door, cleaning his sword. The dervish’s own possessions were few: the sword, his blue silks, his turban made from a length of strong silk that could double for climbing or binding. He toted a square pack on his back that held their foodstuffs, a half-tent, and a small cookpot.

The boy ran his gaze up and down his sword’s blade and slid it carefully into its ornate sheath of blue leather and lapis lazuli. Adoulla had watched him clean the blade just yesterday, and he doubted that the boy’s sword had grown dirty since then. But he had come to understand that this ritual of Raseed’s was about more than maintaining a cherished weapon. It was about focus. About reminding himself, each and every day, what truly mattered to him.

Taking a last long look around the bookshelves and bureaus of his townhouse, Adoulla himself felt something similar.

Chapter 3

Men and women packed the stone Mainway and the sidestreets, inching along and shouting in competition for the few sedan chairs and mule rides available. From what Adoulla could see, those on foot were actually moving faster. Which meant that they would be walking to the stables at the edge of the city. Wonderful. He ought to have been born a Badawi tribesman, for all the walking he had done in his life. But on they walked, moving westward for half an hour.

“So here we are again,” he grunted at Raseed, tired of the silence between them. “Leaving behind safety and comfort to kill monsters. Maybe to be killed. Almighty God knows I don’t have much more of this left in me. You’ll soon have to do this without a mentor, you know.”

“You don’t really mean that, Doctor.” The boy crinkled his fine featured face in distaste as they passed a refuse cart, broken down in the middle of the street and stinking in the morning sun.

“I don’t mean it? Hmph. Need I remind you of our last excursion? I was nearly beheaded, boy! This is how an old man should be living?”

“We saved lives, Doctor. Children’s lives.”

Adoulla managed to half-smile at the dervish. I wish the knowledge of that still kept my feet from aching, the way it did when I was your age, he thought. I wish it could keep me from freezing up and accepting death. But what he said was, “Yes, I suppose we did.”

They kept walking, making their way past the gaudy storefronts that lined the Lane of Monkeys. Adoulla watched an ancient husband and wife sitting cross-legged on a long reed mat in front of a teahouse ahead of them. They were all dirty gray hair and wrinkled brown skin, playing a fierce game of bakgam. The man moved his token across the board’s painted sword tips and, with a loud clack and a victorious smile, landed on the first sword. The old woman was about to lose. She scowled and spat, the glob nearly hitting Raseed as he and Adoulla walked by.

Just after they passed the old couple, Adoulla heard the rattle of triangle dice in the bakgam cup, the clatter as they hit the board, and a series of shouts. The old woman cackled and began a taunting, incomprehensible victory song as her husband cursed in disbelief. She’d rolled an eight!

That should be Miri and me, Adoulla couldn’t help thinking. He should have married Miri a long time ago. He should have left the lunatic life of a ghul hunter. Instead, year after year, he had foolishly decided that fighting fanged things and stopping the spells of wicked men was more important than happiness. Instead of a blissful marriage, he had monstrosities on his mind and a pile of “should haves” pressing down upon his soul.

He and Raseed finally neared the western gate which would take them out of the city. As they crossed a small alleyway, a doe-eyed girl of an age with Raseed smiled a none-too-shy smile at the dervish. Raseed made a choking noise and kept his eyes on the ground until the girl was a block away.

Though he knew it was a lost cause, Adoulla couldn’t help himself. “What is wrong with you, boy? Did you not see the way that little flower looked at you? You could have at least smiled back!”

“Doctor, please!” The boy paused. “This attack. You spoke of the extraordinary powers of this ghul pack’s master. Do you think one of the Thousand and One, rather than a man, made these ghuls?”

So much focus on duty, so much neglect of what really matters. He doesn’t know the painful end of this road….

Adoulla abandoned his avuncular attempt to get Raseed to act like a living, breathing young man. The dervish would rather think about monsters than smile at a girl. Very well. But he sounded too eager about the possibility of fighting a djenn. If he’d ever actually faced one of the Thousand and One in battle, he’d feel differently.

“It wasn’t a djenn, boy. When one of the fire-born strikes, no one escapes, least of all a child.”

The dervish nodded thoughtfully. Whatever else Adoulla found irritating about Raseed, he was at least deferential to Adoulla’s experience.

“I wonder—” Adoulla continued as they rounded a corner, but the words twisted into a shouted curse as he saw the massive crowd that lay before them.

“Ahhh, God’s balls! The Horrible Halt!” Adoulla pronounced the Dhamsawaati term for the complete standstill of traffic with a familiar disgust. Before them, a wall of people seemed to rise up as the blocks-long tangle of carts, camels, and fools slowly pinched its way through the wide western gate. Adoulla collided with an unwashed little man who had been walking in front of him. He barely acknowledged the man’s loud admonition to watch where he put his big feet.

“Some sort of gate inspection?” Raseed asked.

Adoulla snorted. “ ‘Gate inspection,’ ‘tariff-checks,’ ‘watchmen’s business.’ It’s all the same monkeyshit. And there’s more of it every day.” At the rate the line was moving, it would be another hour before they were through.

A ghul pack was loose, which meant lives were at stake. But Dhamsawaat’s hundred headaches hurried for no man. One did not walk through the gates of Dhamsawaat the way one walked through a townhouse door. There was first the gray stone inner wall, then one passed through Inspector’s Square, and then through the great main wall, a hundred feet thick. Then one crossed a house-lined lane past the last guardwall before taking the Bridge of Yellow Roses over a ditch. The process had never been a quick one, and due to the new Khalif’s poor city management, it took longer than ever.

The duo cut through the throng as best they could without being truly rude. Adoulla did not want to start a fight, and fights were not uncommon in situations like these. Another quarter-hour and he and Raseed managed to get near the wide gate at the main wall. There the road rose slightly, and Adoulla saw that this was more than a simple traffic tangle.

An execution! The great gray paving stones of Inspector’s Square had been cleared of carts. At its center lay a worn leather mat. A boy of no more than two and ten kneeled on the mat, his hands and feet bound and his eyes wide with terror. A huge, hooded man with a broad bladed sword stood over him.

Adoulla stopped walking, transfixed with horror. Name of God! What could a child that age have possibly done to deserve such a fate?

As if in answer, a high-pitched voice assaulted his ears. Turning toward the sound, he saw a liveried crier standing in an alcove carved in the stone archway above the gate. The man shouted shrilly through a metal cone.

“O fortunate subjects of God’s Regent in the World, the Defender of Virtue, the Most Exalted of Men, His Majesty the Khalif, how God smiles upon you to provide you with such a ruler! See how your benevolent monarch, Jabbari akh-Khaddari, Khalif of Abassen and of all the Crescent Moon Kingdoms, protects you from the grasping hands of thieves! See how he punishes the wicked swiftly and terribly!”

Traffic still moved at an inchworm’s pace, but most of the folk on the road were now gawking at the square. Adoulla stood still, wanting to stop this wickedness but knowing he could not. Someone behind him pushed past, trying to get forward in the press.

He looked back to the leather mat. Almighty God, why do you allow this? Why do you send me to fight monsters outside of my city while such monsters live within it?

God did not answer.

Raseed, who had also stopped, looked at him with concern. “Doctor, what do you—”

Without warning, something flew at the hooded executioner’s face, covering it in an amber goop. Then the man’s chest exploded in red.

A crossbow bolt! Men and women screamed. There was a sound like a thundercrack and a puff of orange smoke suddenly obscured the square. A moment later, the smoke cleared and Adoulla saw only the sprawled form of the dead executioner.

The bound boy was gone.

What could—?

There was another thundercrack, this one from the alcove above the gate. More orange smoke wreathed the recess where the crier had stood. It cleared almost instantly, and Adoulla made out the crier’s liveried form slumped at the feet of a tall, broad-shouldered man. This man wore a costume of calfskin and black silk, emblazoned with falcons. His arms were as thick as some men’s legs, but he moved like a dancer as he stepped to the alcove’s lip.

It’s him! thought Adoulla, who’d heard much of the man but never seen him. Pharaad Az Hammaz, the—

“The Falcon Prince!” The words left a dozen mouths around Adoulla.

More trouble. A confident grin split the famous thief’s moustachioed face. Adoulla shouldn’t have been able to read the man’s facial expression quite so clearly at such a distance. An address-spell was at work, then—the kind that, supposedly, only the Khalif could afford. Every person in the crowd would have the same clear view of the Falcon Prince, would hear his words as if he stood beside them, and would find themselves… not coerced by the Prince’s magic, but open to hearing what he had to say. It was likely the only reason they weren’t panicking and fleeing.

Raseed growled. “The criminal!”

Well, most people would be open to hearing the man, Adoulla corrected himself. Technically, Adoulla could not dispute Raseed’s epithet. Ten years ago, a string of flamboyant robberies of the city’s wealthiest citizens were showily announced to be the work of a single brilliant bandit, who called himself the Falcon Prince. Pharaad Az Hammaz, as he had later revealed his name to be, never himself claimed to be true royalty, but the rumors persisted that he was the last heir of a kingly line from Abassen’s dim past.

Royalty or not, the Falcon Prince was one of the most powerful men in Dhamsawaat. He and his small army of beggars and thieves had become an almost governmental force, the semiofficial voice of the poor. And while the landowners and merchants who took up the cry of “share the wealth” were few and far between, Adoulla had heard from sound sources that a few of the Khalif’s most powerful ministers, due to personal conviction or bribery, secretly backed the bandit.

“God’s peace, good people of Dhamsawaat!” The thief boomed, his outstretched arms embracing the crowd. “Our time together is short! Hear the words of a Prince who loves you!” A small, cautious cheer went up from a few corners. “I’ve freed an innocent boy from the Khalif’s headsman. His crime? Being fool enough to think he could pick coins from a watchman’s purse and feed his ailing mother! Now, we grown folk know that watchmen are as attached to their purses as normal men are to their olive sacks.” The bandit grabbed at his crotch and the crowd laughed hesitantly at his bawdiness. “But did the child deserve to die? Do we Dhamsawaatis care more for the ill-earned wealth of bullies than for the life of a child?”

The crowd grew bolder, and shouts of “No, no!” and “May God forbid it!” erupted from all corners.

The Falcon Prince stood, hands on hips, drinking it in. “I am guilty, good people! I freed the boy. I hit the headsman with a honey pie before I killed him! Only a hungry, hungry man would chop off a child’s head for a few filthy coins. So I fed him! Honey and steel, good people!” The crowd laughed loudly now at the Falcon’s cheerful, casual tone, and he went on.

“The old Khalif and I were enemies. He was no hero, but he spent fifty years watching over this city, which he loved. But for three years now, his fool of a son has bled Dhamsawaat. He has tried to find me and kill me. He! Has! Failed!” With the help of the address-spell, the Falcon boomed each word with a great drum’s rumble.

The crowd sent up a boisterous cheer, and a small knot of men took up a chant:

The old-as-sand song—in which a noble falcon gouges out the eyes of a cruel king—had become associated with the Falcon Prince, and the new Khalif had made the singing of it punishable by flogging.

There’s going to be real trouble here. A dozen watchmen in riveted jerkins shoved their way through the packed crowd toward the gate. They brandished slender steel maces and tried to keep their eyes on the alcove and the crowd at the same time.

As the Khalif’s men moved toward the knot of singers the song died down. At once, though, a fresh round of “Fly, O Falcon” went up on the opposite side of the crowd. The watchmen’s heads all whipped toward the sound in unison, but they let the singers be and tried to reach the Prince himself, who had stopped speechifying to caper to the tune as best he could in the small alcove. The bandit’s jollity only caused the singers in the crowd to sing more boisterously. This time, men did not stop chanting when the knot of watchmen passed. And Adoulla saw the Khalif’s men were scanning the crowd more anxiously as they made their way toward the gate. A dozen against hundreds.

Beside him, Adoulla sensed a sudden battle tension in his protégé. Raseed drew his sword soundlessly, and everyone around him took a step back. The blade was two-pronged, according to the Traditions of the Order, “in order to cleave right from wrong.” Adoulla feared that Raseed was about to try to do so now.

“What are you doing?” Adoulla whispered.

“I’m going to help the watchmen, Doctor.”

“The Falcon Prince is not our enemy, boy.”

“With apologies, Doctor, he is not a prince. He uses magic to commit crimes. Exactly the sort of thing that we are obligated to fight!”

Raseed started to move again, but Adoulla grabbed his slender shoulder. He could hardly restrain Raseed if the dervish chose to interfere, but Adoulla hoped his age and authority would prevail.

“We are obligated to fight the servants of the Traitorous Angel. Pharaad Az Hammaz may be a criminal, but he feeds the poor and chastens the proud. Surely even your zealous eyes can see the virtue in that!”

The boy said nothing. He frowned hard at Adoulla. Then he sheathed his sword.

In the alcove, the Falcon Prince spread his huge hands wide as if welcoming the approaching watchmen to a banquet. “The Khalif’s dogs come for me, my friends! If you hear their yappy mouths a-cursing, it is because some scoundrel has sabotaged their crossbows! But this is only the beginning, dear Dhamsawaatis! Stand ready! The day comes soon when we take back what is ours! There will be choices before us all, though some would have us believe that they are meant by God to do our choosing for us! But are we of Dhamsawaat bound by chains forged by the tyrants of past days? Does a man rule us without limit or wisdom just because his father ruled?”

A booming “NO!” went up from the crowd, and a dozen different voices shouted support.

“Let the Falcon rule!”

“God grant us a wise Khalif!”

“No chains here, O Falcon!”

Adoulla would wager money that the flamboyant thief had placed these men and women in the crowd himself. The watchmen were nearly at the gate now, but they had to push through an increasingly hostile crowd. The Prince continued.

“We of the Jewel of Abassen love a Khalif who does his duty. Who helps feed his people. Who steals not their coin. But a Khalif who dooms us with his greed and his cruelty? Well—” menace edged into the bandit’s voice “—well, even a Khalif is but a man, and better a bad man should die than our good city!” Due to the address-spell everyone in the crowd saw the infectious gleam in the Falcon Prince’s eye.

A clamor went up from the crowd. Some of it was outraged muttering. But a good number of folk were clearly emboldened by the Prince’s regicidal words, and they made a lot of noise. At the edge of the crowd Adoulla noticed an extravagantly dressed merchant and a liveried civil servant making their way out of the crowd, frightened looks on their faces.

Raseed put a hand back to his sword hilt and shifted restlessly.

“When there is little food to buy and less work to be had, when half our sons have known the gaol and half our daughters have been shamed by watchmen, the people of Dhamsawaat have risen up before! It will happen again, my friends! Stand ready! Stand ready!”

The watchmen were now climbing to the crier’s alcove. More of them were streaming in from the other side of the gate. But there was another thundercrack, another cloud of orange smoke, and the Prince was gone.

Almighty God!

The crowd quickly lost its boldness. Men and women went back to their business, giving the furious watchmen a wide berth. Beside Adoulla, Raseed cleared his throat, and Adoulla remembered the urgency of their task. Movement through the tight-packed crowd had been impossible during the Prince’s appearance, and the crowd moved slowly now.

“Come, boy, this gate will be gummed up for hours now. Maybe we can cross over to the avenue and hire a sedan. With all the commotion here, the Chair-Bearer’s Gate might actually be quicker than this mess.” Adoulla tried not to dwell on how much time they’d lost already. Lost time meant more men dead beneath the fangs of ghuls.

They walked a half-dozen long blocks and turned the corner into an uncrowded alley. It felt like a different city. The alleyway was cooler, shaded as it was by tall buildings on either side. A hard-eyed woman sat on her doorstep, and she looked up suspiciously from the basket she was weaving when the pair walked by. She and a bone thin poppy-chewer, who lay sprawled on another doorstep, apparently talking to the clouds, were the only people in the alley. Adoulla’s discerning nose detected stewed goat wafting from a window, and he greedily inhaled the smell.

“Watch your step, Doctor!” Even as the words left Raseed’s mouth Adoulla felt his sandal sink into a warm pile of camel shit. Adoulla cursed and scraped his foot on the stone. He turned back to curse again at the brownish smear behind him.

And found himself face-to-face with the Falcon Prince.

Name of God! Where did he come from? The man was nearly six and a half feet tall. Taller even than Adoulla, and rippling with muscle where Adoulla jiggled with fat. His black moustaches were meticulously groomed, and his handsome brown face split in a grin.

Out of the corner of his eye Adoulla saw Raseed turn and draw his sword. The Falcon took a wary step back. The thief looked at Raseed as one might a dangerous animal. But he smiled again as he spoke.

“Well, this is something one doesn’t see in every alley! A dervish of the Order and a ghul hunter—Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, I would guess.” The Prince’s manner was strangely casual, given the situation he had just fled.

Adoulla said nothing but let his face register surprise at being known outside of his home quarter.

“Yes, Doctor, I know of you. Had we time, I would repeat all of the praises that I have heard sung of you among the poor of the Scholars’ Quarter. But there are watchmen a few blocks behind me.”

“Murderer!” Raseed spat the word and took a step forward, but Adoulla threw an arm across the boy’s chest.

The Prince ignored the dervish and spoke to Adoulla. “Will you help me, Uncle? My next steps—and the lives of others—depend on whether the watchmen know my true path.”

So, a ghul-orphaned boy was not enough for old Adoulla Makhslood today, eh, God? No, You had to involve Your fat old servant in a mad usurper’s plots as well! Wonderful. Adoulla looked up at the Prince.

He could hem and haw, but there was only one choice here, and this was a matter of moments. “They will not know your true path,” he muttered. Beside him, Raseed made an angry noise.

The Prince bowed his head. “The Falcon Prince thanks you, Uncle! Mayhap I will have the chance to return the favor someday.” The bandit then leapt up, landing on a second-story balcony.

Remarkable. Adoulla had seen leaping-spells before, but the way the Prince’s physical grace blended with the obviously magical enhancements was still impressive. With two more quick leaps he was on the building’s roof and lost from sight. Beside Adoulla, the dervish let out what seemed an involuntary grunt of respect.

Adoulla heard the shout and clatter of approaching watchmen. “We saw him go the other way, yes?” he said tersely.

Fury filled the boy’s tilted eyes. “I will not lie to protect that villain, Doctor!”

“Then conceal yourself, boy, and let me talk!” But the dervish did not move. “Please!” Adoulla urged.

The boy shook his turbaned head, but he stepped into the alley shadows, where he seemed to disappear.

Two watchmen rounded the corner running. From the noise I’d have guessed it was a whole squadron. Belligerent fools. Adoulla kept himself from darting his eyes about the alley’s shadows. He prayed that the boy would stay hidden.

“You there, old man! Halt! Halt if you value your life!” The watchmen were both tall, fresh-faced young men. Again they shouted at Adoulla to halt, though he was standing still.

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.

Chapter 4

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.

They reached the road, and the Doctor mounted his mule with a series of grunts and huffs from both him and the beast. Raseed eyed his own mule again. He’d had little need of steeds or pack animals in his solo travels. The true dervish needs no horse, said the Traditions. And his Shaykhs at the Lodge of God said that Raseed was the fastest dervish the Order had ever seen. He could run for miles without tiring. As far as pack animals went, the Traditions were equally clear: The true dervish needs no more than he can carry on his back. Still, the Doctor always traveled by beast, and called it “show-off-ish” when Raseed insisted upon walking beside him. Raseed had taken to hiring mules and sedan chairs along with the Doctor, just to keep from hearing him complain.

Just for that? Or because you have grown lazy, and he gives you an excuse? His own reprimanding voice echoed through his head. Next time he would walk, he resolved.

They spent hours riding, moving past suburbs and outlying farms until there were no signs that they had left the world’s greatest city behind them. There were few people moving along the hard-packed road now, only one or two carts or camels at a time. Since leaving the Lodge, Raseed had spent little time outside of Dhamsawaat, and as he rode he marveled again at how the sky seemed to open up above them.

Finally, when the sun had sunk halfway to the horizon, and they were alone on the road, the Doctor brought his mule to a halt, struggling briefly with the beast. Raseed pulled up beside him. “Well,” the Doctor half-shouted, “this is as good a place as any to cast the tracking spell. Come!” He gestured Raseed to the side of the road and dismounted with a loud grunt. The Doctor then reached into his satchel and hunched down to the ground with an even louder grunt.

He is always making rude noises, Raseed thought with irritation. Grunting, scratching, laughing too loudly. But it is my duty to keep him safe. In one motion Raseed also dismounted, gathering the reins of both mules and standing over the Doctor protectively as he worked his spell.

The Doctor had pulled out a bit of paper, the bloody scrap of the child Faisal’s clothing, a vial, and a long platinum needle. He wrote something on the paper, pricked his finger with the needle, and pinned cloth and paper both to the ground. Then he stood, closed his eyes, and recited from the Heavenly Chapters, sprinkling out a dark green powder—mint?—with each Name of God he spoke. “ ‘God is the Seer of the Unseen! God is the Knower of the Unknown! God is the Revealer of Things Hidden! God is the Teacher of Mysteries!’ ”

Nothing happened, so far as Raseed could see, but the Doctor, his brow sweaty now, opened his eyes and took his mule’s reins from Raseed. He remounted and continued down the road. He said nothing, not even turning to see if Raseed was following. As Raseed mounted and trotted up beside the Doctor he realized why. He’s winded—the traveling, the spell—it’s all taking its toll on him. Raseed tried not to be worried by this.

Raseed gave the Doctor a few minutes to catch his breath before he spoke. “You have found the ghuls’ trail, Doctor?”

“Aye,” was all the Doctor said.

Mile after mile they rode the mules at a brisk walk, moving at a slant toward the sinking sun. As the road veered further west and closer to the River of Tigers, the land swiftly sank and grew marshy. The air grew more humid and more and more gnats filled it, irritating Raseed’s eyes and nose. When the sun was touching the horizon with pink and purple, Raseed saw a scrawny, bearded farmer walking toward them—the only traveler they’d come across in an hour. The man gave the mules a wide berth and mumbled “God’s peace” from the opposite side of the road as they passed, avoiding eye contact. Is he afraid of us? Or does he have something to hide?

He is not why you are here, Raseed chided himself. Stay focused.

The landscape was dotted with large boulders that might hide anything. Raseed watched for signs of movement about them. The River of Tigers lay just out of sight on their right, its presence indicated by a clean, wet scent, by date palms and by the great patches of steelreed that clacked in the evening breeze.

“Stop.” The Doctor spoke the word loudly enough to startle two marshbirds into flight. It was the first time he’d spoken in a long while. “The trail veers off here, but something is not quite right.”

“What do you mean, Doctor?”

Raseed’s mentor looked truly confused—a rare sight. “I don’t rightly know, boy. In all my years of casting tracking spells, nothing like this has happened. Normally I feel—maybe better to say I hear within my mind—God’s prompts in the direction of my quarry. And this is still the case. Our prey is close and in that direction.” The Doctor pointed off the road to the left, toward a dense patch of boulders and a lone hill with a pointed top. “But I also hear His hints about other dangers. ‘The jackal that eats souls.’ ‘The thing that slays the lion’s pride.’ I… I don’t know what it means. In all my years I’ve never…” The Doctor let go of his reins and held his head in his hands. Raseed tried to hide his worry.

The Doctor took a deep breath and noisily exhaled. He looked up, shook his head, and ran a hand through his beard. “Gone. Whatever it was, it’s gone.” He looked around as if he’d been woken from a dream. Another deep breath and an exhalation loud enough to be a camel’s. “Forget it, boy, never mind. I’m old and tired and haven’t had enough to eat today.” Raseed’s mentor clearly did not believe this, but if the Doctor wished to say no more, Raseed could do little about it. “Let us continue,” the Doctor said, turning his mule off the road and picking his way downward with the slight decline of the land.

Raseed followed.

After another quarter hour it was dark, save for the faint light of the stars and the moon, hidden behind a silvery shroud of cloud. They came to the base of the point-topped hill, and Raseed saw that it wasn’t a hill at all, but a sloping rock formation that jutted up fifty feet from the ground at an angle, like a tiny mountain. The Doctor guided his mule’s steps onto the rock, and its hooves clopped loudly against the stone. Behind, Raseed rode his own mount up the incline as it steepened sharply. The Doctor, following prompts that Raseed could neither hear nor see, then turned, to ride across the huge wedge of stone.

The precision of the rock’s triangular shape and the smoothness of the stone made Raseed wonder whether the slope they were riding across had been shaped by men. If so, what sort of men walked on it?

“Doctor where does this stone come from? What building once stood here?” Raseed asked quietly. He prided himself that he did not feel fear easily, but there was something troubling about walking across the floorstones of the long-dead.

The Doctor spoke distractedly, looking all about him as he did. “It’s from the Kem empire, that’s for sure. Maybe the cornerstone of—”

The Doctor let the sentence die on his lips and drew his mule to a sharp halt, the animal objecting noisily. He narrowed his eyes and peered about. “Dismount!” he whispered, and clambered off his mule.

Raseed obeyed. He gathered both animals’ reins, but let them fall as the Doctor whispered again.

“Let them go. No time to tie them.” Again Raseed did as he was told, and the beasts trotted down the slope toward a patch of thornclover near the stone’s base.

“Bone ghuls. More than one… nearby.” the Doctor said, cocking his head. It looked as if he were listening to something inside his skull. He shot his big hand into his satchel. “Bottom of the slope!” he barked.

Raseed did not ask how the Doctor knew. He drew his sword and scanned the near-darkness below them. Suddenly the mules began braying fearfully. Raseed’s keen eyes made out their dark shapes, fleeing the stone slope.

Then he saw other shapes, man-like—one, two, three of them—stepping from behind boulders, moving up the incline. And he heard the hissing.

The hissing of ghuls was like no other sound in this world. A thousand serpents rasping with a man’s hatred. Raseed had heard the sound more than once. But it still made his skin crawl.

The clouds blew across the sky and the scene below them was bathed in moonlight. Even the Doctor’s old eyes would be able to see plainly now. Three bone ghuls, all claws and jaws and gray skin, were scrambling up the slope of the huge stone block.

“We have gone from hunters to prey, Doctor.”

The Doctor grunted and pulled something from his satchel. Two of the three ghuls had closed to twenty yards. The Doctor regarded them coolly, held aloft a small stoppered vial and threw it to the ground. The glass shattered, the smell of vinegar and flowers filled the air, and the Doctor bellowed scripture.

“God is the Mercy That Kills Cruelty!” There was a sound like a landslide and the two closest ghuls, their false souls snuffed out, lost their man-like shape and collapsed into piles of turned earth and graveworms. Two of the monsters at one stroke! Not for the first time, Raseed marveled at the Doctor’s powers. He felt reassured to be admiring his mentor and not fearing for him.

One of the ghuls still stood. The Doctor leaned forward with his hands on his knees, clearly worn out by his spell. “Your turn, boy!”

Even as the words left the Doctor’s lips, Raseed sped toward the last creature, his sword flying out in search of ghul-flesh. The thing hissed with mindless malevolence and raked its long claws, but Raseed kept it at a double swordlength’s distance.

He danced in two steps and slashed out, feeling his sword bite into the monster. There was a loud hiss and the ghul’s severed claw went arcing through the air, maggots dripping forth like drops of blood. One of the maggots landed on Raseed’s cheek. The ghul didn’t even pause. It swung out with its mutilated stump and Raseed took a darting step back, not daring to brush away the itching insect.

The ghul pressed in, but Raseed had the advantage now. The creature didn’t feel pain, and one-clawed it could still have easily killed most men. But Raseed was not most men. He snaked left, then right, always keeping the ghul’s good claw at a distance. He waited for an opening and found it when the thing lunged at him with its snapping jaws.

Raseed shifted, brought his sword up, brought it down. The ghul’s head flopped from its shoulders. Its body trembled and dissolved into a pile of maggots and grave soil.

Raseed brushed a maggot from his face and stepped back to the Doctor’s side, finding him winded but unharmed. “Doctor! Where do you think—”

More hissing. The words died on Raseed’s lips.

Two more bone ghuls clambered up from the ledge of the sheer far face of the stone block. Merciful God! Raseed had fought bone ghouls since joining the Doctor. But always one or two of them. He hadn’t known a ghul pack of this size could be made. The Doctor still huffed beside him, likely unable to work another invocation so soon.

Raseed charged at the ghuls, his two-pronged sword out to his side as he slashed past them. His sword bit into one ghul’s neck, was nearly wrenched from his hands. He drew the blade back and kept moving. He dodged claws, drew their attention away from the Doctor. The ghuls pressed him back until his heels were less than a yard from the cliff edge of the massive stone block. He tried to get a glimpse of the Doctor, but the creatures blocked his view.

Maggots dribbled from one ghul’s neck-wound. That one staggered, its energy clearly unfocused. The other stared at Raseed with empty eyes. Some vicious unliving instinct within the monster was weighing when to strike.

The Doctor’s big white kaftan-clad form shuffled forward, shouting. His voice was weak as he pronounced, “God is the Hope of the Hopeless!”

The wounded ghul collapsed. The other one flew at Raseed. The wind was knocked out of him as the monster slammed into him. He scrabbled back two steps.

The ground give way beneath Raseed’s feet.

He and the ghul went plummeting in a tangle of limbs over the edge of the stone block.

Raseed tensed his body and focused his soul. He twisted, letting his sword fly from his hand and kicking the ghul away as he fell. The rocky ground rushed toward him, but Raseed was calm within the slow-time sense of his training. His acrobatic skill was God-blessed, beyond that of any rope dancer or tumbler. This fall would not harm him.

He tucked himself into a ball and hit the ground rolling with only a hard grunt. He continued the roll for another twenty feet and stood, panting. His keen eyes caught the moon-glint of his sword a few feet away, and he scooped it up, reassured by the familiar feeling of its hilt in his hand.

Where is the ghul? Raseed looked around, bracing for another fight. He saw the bone ghul ten feet away, sprawled on the ground, twitching. The monster had landed head first, cracking its skull open upon a sharp, man-sized rock. The thing hissed feebly, twitched once more, and dissipated into a heap of dead vermin.

Praise God! Only then did Raseed allow himself to feel the stinging pain across his chest and ribs. The thing had raked him with its rancid claws, shredding his silk robes and grazing his flesh. The wound will need herb-purging. The Doctor had taught him some time ago that the old tale of ghul-wounds turning men into ghuls was nonsense, but the charnel monsters’ dirty claws could still kill with any number of very real diseases.

Raseed heard the Doctor shouting from the top of the stone block. Still more of the creatures? He ran to the sheer face of the block and started climbing with the speed that ordinary men found so amazing. The Doctor had already been exhausted when he’d spoken his last invocation. In such shape he was a poor match for the minions of the Traitorous Angel. Raseed climbed faster. He ignored his wounds and the painful scrape of rock against his fingertips and hoped he wasn’t too late.

Chapter 5

Adoulla had begun this battle feeling like a cocksure younger man—he’d sensed the ghuls early, dispatched several, watched his assistant sever another ghul’s head. But that first burst of nostalgic bravado was gone now. Adoulla didn’t doubt that Raseed had survived that fall, but he might need Adoulla’s help. And there might be still more ghuls about. Adoulla was drop down tired, but professional pride and worry for his assistant kept him from collapsing. He turned toward where Raseed had fallen, digging into his satchel again and producing a small vellum envelope.

Something at the edge of his vision moved toward him. Adoulla spun away from whatever it was. Something heavy struck him across his back.

He went sprawling, the envelope and his satchel flying from his hands. A large form snaked between him and his bag. Stubbornly, he pushed away the pain in his back. He scuttled away from the creature, breathing heavily as he came to his feet.

Adoulla shouted out in shock. Another bone ghul. A massive bone ghul. The largest ghul he’d seen in forty years.

Impossible! To make a creature of that size—along with all of these others! The power involved was incalculable. The creature towered over him, and he was not a small man. Who could make and control this nine-foot monstrosity?

It took a step toward him. Adoulla looked from the thing’s soulless eyes to its broad claws. One of those claws could crush his head like a melon. Indeed, only his half-conscious dodge had saved him from a broken back. And despite the world-weariness with which he faced each day, Adoulla was not ready to have his head crushed like a melon just yet. If nothing else, Raseed needed him.

He stared into the ghul’s flat, pupil-less eyes. Softly, desperately, he began to whistle “Under the Pear Tree, My Sweet.” As soon as the first notes left his lips, the monster froze in its tracks. A confident gaze and the ghul-soothing sound of a favorite song. It was an unreliable, old womanish charm, with none of the power or grace of scripture invocations. Sometimes it didn’t work, and when it did it was effective for only a minute or so. But it had saved his life more than once.

The huge monster’s claws were draped at its sides, and it swayed slowly with the tune. Adoulla tried to whistle, hold the ghul’s eyes, and consider his options, all at the same time. The phrase I am too old kept getting in the way of his thoughts.

Not now! one part of him barked at the other. His satchel, with all of his components, lay on the ground just past the giant ghul. It might as well be in Rughal-ba. If he took a step toward it, he’d break the whistle charm. He kept whistling, but he was coming to the end of the song—and thus the end of the ghul-soothing.

Adoulla prayed that the ghul’s claws would not catch him when he dove for his medicine bag. He didn’t like his chances. This is it, then, Adoulla thought. An ignoble death courtesy of a hissing abomination. He couldn’t say he was surprised. What I wouldn’t give for one last cup of cardamom tea, or one last meal in my townhouse.

He weakly whistled the last note of the tune through dry lips and tensed his muscles. The creature squealed.

Then something leapt at the ghul.

It wasn’t Raseed. Adoulla saw a flash of golden fur and a lashing tail. Some sort of animal had fastened itself to the giant ghul’s back. The monster’s milky white eyes widened and then contracted. It squealed again in pain.

Adoulla shoved melancholic thoughts to the side and tried to gather facts. What had hurt the ghul, and how could Adoulla use it to his advantage?

The gray-green monster twisted as it tried to shake this new attacker from its back. As the ghul turned, Adoulla got a better look at the extraordinary animal that had saved his life. A sleek she-lion with eyes like green fire and an impossibly shimmery gold coat.

Adoulla’s mind raced with remembered lore. Not an animal at all. In fact, if the desert legends were to be believed, a creature such as this was an agent of the Angels’ justice—and thus of God’s. Adoulla said a quick, silent prayer of thanksgiving.

Still, “God helpeth most the man who helpeth himself.” Adoulla risked grabbing for his satchel.

By the time he scooped it up and had his hand in it, though, he saw an invocation would not be needed. His rescuer had snuffed out the false soul within that monstrous mock human frame. As the thing died, it burbled in that manner that still, after all these years, turned Adoulla’s stomach. Then, with a sound like the scrape of a great grave lid, the ghul crumbled, a carpet of cemetery soil and dead coffin-moths spilling forth.

A bright flare of sun-like light rippled out from the lioness’ coat. When the flare subsided, a plain-faced brown girl of perhaps five and ten stood where the lioness had been. She was dressed in the simple sand-colored camel calf suede of the Badawi tribesmen. It was as if Adoulla had blinked and someone had replaced the razor-mawed creature of a moment ago with this green-eyed little girl.

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a thing.

The rare, almost-forgotten gift of the lion-shape. He had known another tribesman thus gifted by God many years ago—a good man for a savage, but terrifying to witness when crossed. Adoulla would have to tread carefully here.

“Hello,” he managed.

The girl stared at him with those emerald eyes, wary.

“God’s peace,” he tried.

The girl’s expression softened almost imperceptibly, but she was still hard-faced. “God’s peace,” she said curtly, brushing her coarse, shoulder length hair from her eyes. A girl of her age speaking to a man of Adoulla’s ought to have been more respectful in her tone—at the very least, she should have called him “Uncle.” But the uncouth Badawi showed no decorum to any save their own. The girl followed her first two words with barked questions. “You were fighting these foul creatures? It was you who destroyed the others?”

“Indeed.” Adoulla said, holding back the admonitions that were on the tip of his tongue. “Thank you for your help, child. It has been many years since I’ve been face-to-face with one who was gifted with the lion-shape.”

The girl’s mouth fell open. “You know of the gift? And you do not fear me?”

Adoulla shrugged. “You’re used to dealing with your ignorant fellow tribesmen, no doubt. Feared you even while depending on your powers? Well, I am no ungrateful savage.” The girl growled at the insult to her people, as if she were still a lioness inside.

Adoulla put both hands up placatingly. “I am a scholar of such phenomena and of their dark versions, girl. The lion-shape is a gift given to men by God through the Angels. ‘You true Badawi watch for the Angel-boon—mane of golden sun, claws of silver moon.’ The shape is known to me, and is nothing to fear. Besides, after forty years of ghul hunting it takes more than a child wearing the shape of a lion to frighten me. Though I am surprised. It has been twenty years since I’ve met one of your kind. And I didn’t know that the gift could be visited upon girls.”

Adoulla heard the faintest whisper of noise as Raseed hoisted himself up from the sheer face of the stone. The girl turned at the sound.

“Well, boy, it’s about time!” Adoulla said as the dervish came trotting up. “Leaving an old man to fend for himself up here! Though, as you can see, we are not alone.”

The boy’s sword was already in his hand, but his expression was more incredulous than battle ready. “Who is the girl, Doctor?”

“Well, among other things she was the instrument of God’s Ministering Angels’ preserving my life. But we’ve had no time for proper introductions.” Adoulla turned to the girl, who was studying Raseed. “I am Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, young woman. My assistant is called Raseed.” A cold wind picked up and Adoulla folded his hands beneath his armpits to stay warm.

The girl frowned again. “You are a ghul hunter? And this one is a dervish?” she asked brusquely, without taking her eyes off Raseed.

Adoulla arched a displeased eyebrow at the ill-mannered child, though he wasn’t sure she saw it. “I am, and he is. But I thought that even the rudest of Badawi would have better manners than to nose into a stranger’s business before even giving their name.”

No hint of embarrassment crossed the girl’s features. “I am Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, Protector of the Band of Nadir Banu Laith Badawi.”

Adoulla glanced at his assistant. It was only then that Adoulla really saw the blood-stained slashes in Raseed’s blue silks. The cuts didn’t look deep, but Adoulla knew from experience how they burned. Of course, the stoic boy would show no sign of complaint. But herbs were needed there—ghulsbane and lavender. Adoulla was no healer, but his friends Dawoud and Litaz had taught him some little bits. “You’re hurt,” he said to his assistant, reaching into his satchel and producing a poultice pouch. He tossed it to the dervish, who sheathed his sword with clear reluctance and began mashing the pouch in his hands, preparing it for application.

Adoulla’s nose twitched at the floral pungency of the herbs being crushed. He looked back to the girl. “Zamia here can take the lion-shape, boy. You do recall my lessons on the old powers of the Empty Kingdom’s desert tribes? She just destroyed the largest ghul I’ve ever seen.”

The dervish’s eyes widened, and his hands stopped squeezing the pouch. He frowned slightly. “Impressive, Doctor. But the Traditions of the Order say ‘Being my enemy’s enemy does not make you my friend.’ ”

“Well, do a little dance, boy—for once those old hypocrites of yours had something wise to say. But I am not calling her a friend. I’m simply saying that she saved my life.”

The girl spit. “Vile men! Do not speak of me as if I weren’t standing before you!” Tribesmen’s speech had always sounded to Adoulla like rocks talking. This rough-looking girl sounded like a grating rain of pebbles. She focused her angry young glare on Adoulla. “What are you doing out here, old man?”

“Doctor, girl! You will call me Doctor or Uncle or something more respectful!” Angel-chosen or not, Adoulla had had enough of this rude little girl’s tone.

“The Badawi owe no allegiance to city titles,” she said sneeringly. Then, reluctantly, “But I will call you Doctor if you wish.” An even more arrogant expression spread across the girl’s homely features. “You say with your own tongue that I saved your life—this means that you owe me a debt of death.”

Adoulla barked out a laugh. Such notions these people have. “Does it, now? I am a ghul hunter, girl. Do you know how many lives I have saved? How many men and women and children I have kept from the claws of monsters? Did they pledge their lives to me? Did they become my slaves? No. This is a relic from one of your people’s ridiculous six-hour six-night story poems.”

The girl growled again but said nothing.

Adoulla sighed. “Look. You asked in your mannerless way what we are doing here? Well, as it stands, this ghul pack slaughtered a marsh family a few days ago. My assistant and I—”

“I saw them,” Zamia interrupted, and it was as if all of the arrogance had been bled from her voice. “I have been tracking these creatures for almost a week now, since they left the deep desert of the Empty Kingdom. I found the marshmen after they were killed, their ribcages cracked open, their hearts ripped from their chests. And their eyes… I’ve seen dead men before. I’ve killed men! Watched life’s light die in their eyes. But this was… There was no brown or black or white in their eyes—only red! Not blood. A glowing red like… like nothing I’ve ever seen. If that is what it means to die beneath a ghul’s claws….” The girl shuddered, folded her arms around her boyish frame, and fell silent.

Adoulla, as well, found himself momentarily speechless. Eyes bright with the color of the Traitorous Angel—more evidence that there was something here even grimmer than the hunting of ghuls. His insides clenched in fear. “Bone ghul or water ghul, sand ghul or night ghul, the unholy monsters eat the still-warm hearts of men. But this… This business with the eyes is something still more horrible. A cruel kind of magic, a form that the old scrolls say has vanished from this world. A sign that not just the flesh, but the soul itself has been sucked away and swallowed like marrow.”

The girl’s green eyes widened with shock. “Such a thing is not possible!”

Raseed, whose hands had been moving beneath his tunic as he applied the poultice, spoke before Adoulla could answer her. “The girl is right. God would not allow such a thing! The Heavenly Chapters say ‘Yea, though the flesh is scourged, the soul of the believer feels no—’ ”

“Please, boy, no scripture quoting! Your inadequate interpretations help nothing here, and my energies are needed for more important things than enlightening you through exegesis. Now—”

Zamia tilted her head and sniffed. “You’re telling the truth,” she said in a suddenly weak voice. “I smell no trace of deceit upon you.” And tears began to well up in her eyes.

Adoulla was perplexed. “And I smell no deceit upon you, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi. Though, despite its prominence, I’m sure my nose is not quite so accurate as yours. But now it is my turn to ask questions. Why these tears now? And how is it that you came to be here alone, stalking these monsters? Where is your band?”

“That is none of your concern,” Zamia said, her words wooden and heavy as she wiped a few tears from her plain face. The wind whipped up for a moment, the sound blending eerily with the harsh call of a hunting night-kite.

“We clearly share an enemy, girl. Surely even a tribesman can see that we should share information as well.” The girl’s eyes tightened, and Adoulla recalled a favorite saying of Miri’s: Bees and beetles alike love honey more than vinegar. That Miri rarely followed this dictum herself meant little. Adoulla needed to try a different tack. “Zamia, I don’t mean you any insult. I know what it is to lose your happiness to the ghuls. And I can help you, girl. If you let me.”

When the girl spoke it was with the voice of a dead woman. “I lied. When I spoke of finding the marshmen’s bodies, I said that I had never seen such a thing. I lied. I had seen it days before. It happened to my band.”

So that’s it. Adoulla reached out a comforting hand to the girl, but she stopped him with an angry look. She swallowed, wiped away another tear, and continued. “I was out scouting one night, far ahead of the rest of the band. The next morning, when I returned to where they’d set their tents… What I found…” The girl’s matter-of-fact tone slid away. She fell silent, her eyes wide with remembered horrors. Then she smothered her pain again and went on.

“Bodies. All of their bodies. All seven and fifty of the Banu Laith Badawi—old Uncle Mahloud and spoiled little Wazzi. Faziza, who believed that she really ruled the band. My father. My beautiful young cousin, who would have been chieftain—his body had been burned. All of them, do you understand? I am the last.”

It had the sound of something the girl had been repeating to herself. Adoulla did not speak, hoping the girl would go on.

“There were foul, puzzling smells everywhere,” she said after a moment. “Jackal-scent where no hair could be found. Fresh spilled child-blood that smelled of ancient buildings. But these scents led nowhere. The only sign I could find was this.” Reaching into her tunic the girl drew forth an ornate curved dagger. The blade was stained with what looked like dried blood.

“It was my father’s. He had hidden it in the folds of his chieftain’s robes. There is blood on it, but the scent is neither man nor animal. And if the stories are to be believed, ghuls bleed no blood.”

Adoulla’s mind raced, recalling the strange phrases that had come to him earlier when he’d sought God’s help in finding the ghuls. ‘The jackal that eats souls.’ ‘The thing that slays the lion’s pride.’ He turned the lines over in his head but still came up with nothing. “Generally, the stories are not to be believed,” he finally said to Zamia. “But that one at least is true. Which means that your father wounded something or someone else. God willing, that dagger may hold answers.”

“God willing,” the girl replied, though she didn’t sound as if she held out much hope. “I have been trying to find the trail of the creatures for days now, seeking to avenge my band so that I may die with honor. I came upon them almost by accident just as they attacked you two.” Zamia was quiet for a moment. She swallowed and then spoke again.

“This… this… soul-eating. This is what they did to my band.” It wasn’t a question. She looked straight ahead as she spoke, and her now dry eyes looked almost soul-eaten themselves. She held the dagger aloft. “This is all that I have of my father, though I will never wield it—for since I was given the lion-shape I foreswore other weapons. ‘My claws, my fangs, the silver knives with which the Ministering Angels strike.’ This is the old saying.”

God save us from the poetry of barbarians! But the words were as bitterly spoken as any Adoulla had ever heard. He had seen God-alone-remembered how many pained faces during his career, but looking at the pain on the face of this rough little girl who was a lion, was not made easier by that history. Still, he knew that, unlike most victims he had dealt with, this one would want and need hard truth more than coddling.

“Listen to me, Angel-touched one. Your family is dead, in body and soul. I can offer you nothing that will change that. But I can offer you a chance at vengeance.” It was the only thing a tribesman could want right now, Adoulla knew. “You may travel with us as an ally if you wish, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi.”

Beside him, Raseed made a choking noise. Adoulla had almost forgotten he was there. “Doctor! We cannot have her…. There is no reason to—”

“Hmph. You forget yourself, Raseed bas Raseed. Who is the mentor and who is the assistant here, boy? Besides, we need Zamia’s knife to find the one that did this. The ghul pack has been destroyed. Now we must find out who made it. And we must kill him. Unfortunately my tracking spell has taken us as far as it is going to take us.”

“Can you not work another spell, then?” The girl was tense. If she were wearing her lion-shape, her tail would be switching, Adoulla thought. He ran a hand over his beard.

“My invocations have their limits, child, just as your powers do. The Chapters say ‘The mightiest of men is but a slim splinter before the forest of God’s power.’ ” He pulled out the scarlet-spotted scrap of cloth that he’d used in his tracking spell. “The blood on this was spilled by the ghul pack we just destroyed. That is how I was able to track them. But the pack’s master—the true murderer of those marshmen, and of your band as well—well, God requires more from us to find him. The blood on Nadir Banu Laith Badawi’s dagger is a good start. May I?” he asked, reaching gently for the weapon.

“You recalled his full name,” the girl said, her angry face showing what Adoulla supposed was a savage’s respect. She handed him the dagger with an anxious look in her eyes.

Adoulla had to nurture that respect if he wished to have the girl’s help without her arrogance and second guessings. Besides, he found that he was desperate to offer her some sort of comfort. He held the blade aloft and squinted at it. “Your father wounded this creature, Zamia. With this weapon we can find the thing and its master and destroy them. Your father has served your band to the last.”

He handed back the dagger, but the girl’s face was blank now. She said nothing. Hmph. And why am I trying to indulge her incomprehensible tribal foolishness, anyway? He got back to the matter at hand, making his tone coolly professional. “A man with the power to make such a ghul pack—and to command these cruel old magics—will have powerful screening spells at his disposal. He knows I am looking for him now, and he will prepare counter measures. Even with this trace of blood, his trail will be impossible to find without the aid of an alkhemist. Praise God, I happen to know one of the best in Dhamsawaat. She does not work on the road anymore, but she’ll help us nonetheless. We’ll return to town tomorrow.”

The girl’s eyes flashed, and Adoulla saw all his progress fly away. “Tomorrow!? Why do we not return now? I am looking for the dog that murdered my band, you fat old fool!” The little Badawi’s expression was petulant and murderous.

His temper’s fire flared, and Adoulla had to remind himself what this savage girl had suffered. Still, he would not be told what to do by a child. Especially not a child with the gritty accent of a sand-behind-the-ears Badawi. She needed to be reminded of what was what.

“Listen to me, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi. These are deep, dark waters we are in here. We need help. But before that we need rest. You may eat with us now, if you wish. We will return to the city tomorrow.” Angel-touched or not, at bottom the girl was just another wounded child of God with a monster problem. Adoulla had learned over the years that those whom he helped needed as much as anything to be told what to do.

After a moment of silent seething, the girl seemed to come to the conclusion that she had little choice but to obey him. She ran a hand through her hair, drew herself up and put on a neutral face. She ignored the invitation to eat. “Very well, Doctor. Tomorrow,” was all she said. She gave Raseed an unreadable look then trotted toward a large rock overhang.

Adoulla watched her disappear behind the rock. He turned to his assistant and caught the boy half-gaping. The dervish shot his eyes to the ground. Adoulla knew this was not the time for ribbing, so he restrained himself. Instead he simply said “You fought well today.” He always felt awkward bestowing praise, but it did the self-doubting dervish good.

Raseed’s yellow-brown cheeks reddened ever so slightly, and he bowed his head in acknowledgement. He was as uncomfortable receiving compliments as Adoulla was giving them. Perhaps, Adoulla mused, this had something to do with why they worked well together.

The boy cleared his throat. “I will go and retrieve the mules, Doctor. They can’t have gotten far.” Tension was evident in his voice. He’s more troubled than usual.

“What is it, boy?” Adoulla asked bluntly.

The dervish seemed to think for a moment before speaking. He adjusted his turban. “The Falcon Prince, a fierce ghul pack, an Angel-touched girl Badawi! Enough wonders and monstrosities for a lifetime. Does this day not trouble you, Doctor?”

Adoulla shrugged sleepily. “More than I can say. Still, I’ve seen worse, boy.”

That was a lie, of course. But it earned a brief, impressed smile from Raseed. The dervish nodded once and, without making a sound, stole his way down the sloped stone.

He watched Raseed’s swift steps and felt a stinging envy for the tirelessness of youth. For a few long moments Adoulla just stood there, listening to the insects of the night and wincing at the pain across his shoulder blades. There was a great stone-scrape across his shin, too, that he’d been too tired or too frightened to notice. He wondered if there was any inch of him that had not been slashed or bruised at some point in his life. Then he made his way carefully down the slope.

A few minutes later Raseed returned, silent as ever but betrayed by the noise the mules made as he led them. The beasts themselves seemed to be unharmed, praise God’s small providences. Adoulla had always found mules to be admirable animals—intelligent and suspicious of authority, but maligned as obstinate and ill-tempered. Not unlike me.

The boy produced a small bronze cookpot and prepared a simple soup over a sputtering fire. Out in the cold night, something small squealed as it died. Perhaps the girl is out there hunting up supper, Adoulla mused, not sure if he was joking.

Raseed was clearly preoccupied as they set to their bread and broth. There was more to it than the horrors and wonders they’d seen today. Adoulla knew the cause, though he doubted the boy had yet admitted it to himself.

The girl.

No doubt the dervish was twisting himself in knots trying to square the circle of his pious oaths with a young man’s natural reactions, and only half aware he was doing so. When Adoulla was a young man, he would have told the girl that she had a lovely face and been done with it. Though this particular girl did not have a lovely face, exactly.

No, the girl was not what anyone would call pretty, but she had a rough, vital energy that clearly spoke to Raseed. But the boy was incapable of being honest with himself, let alone with a woman. Adoulla faulted the rigid Lodge of God, which had trained the boy into being a sword of a man.

Then again, Adoulla himself hadn’t known a woman’s touch in a while. He glanced and occasionally winked at young women but he felt awkward doing anything more. And among the older women, there was only one who mattered to him.

Miri.

Before he fell asleep, Adoulla let his thoughts linger for a while on Miri Almoussa. The great love of his life’s warm, welcoming curves danced before his mind’s eye, and he could almost hear her heavy, husky voice whispering loving taunts in his ear and offering him teacakes. His eyes fluttered shut, and he drifted toward sleep, already half-dreaming of swaying hips and sugar frosting.

And again a small animal cried a death-cry out in the darkness.

The war is upon us. The slaughtered calf screams.

And thieves in the night have stolen my dreams.

The line from Ismi Shihab’s Leaves of Palm came to Adoulla unbidden. With a dejected snort he rolled over and resigned himself to sleeping alone on a pallet on the cold, hard ground.

Chapter 6

Zamia Banu Laith Badawi stretched and flexed her muscles by the light of the still rising sun. She sipped from her waterskin, pulled on her gazelle-hide boots, and packed her bedroll.

Just as her thoughts went to last night’s battle and to her new allies, she caught the approaching scent of the dervish Raseed. A half moment later, the lithe little holy man peeled himself from the shadows of a rock not ten feet away. She felt a flash of shame—no man or animal had ever gotten so close to her without her scenting them before! The last traces of the ghul pack’s corrupt stench had blown away on the night wind, and she was better rested than she had been the night before. She had no excuse! But when she did get a clear scent on the dervish she was shocked out of her self-scolding.

Ministering Angels help me! She had never been in the presence of a scent that was so strong, yet so clean. Zamia found her shame deepening, but for new reasons. It was all she could do to keep from staring at the pure-smelling, clean-shaven little man in blue. She made a small, surprised noise.

“God’s peace,” the holy man said by way of greeting, his angular face unreadable.

“God’s peace,” Zamia repeated. The morning air felt warm and thick in her lungs.

“I apologize if I startled you,” the dervish said flatly. “We are packing up and will leave soon now.”

She snorted. “You didn’t startle me. And, as you can see, I am ready to leave already.”

The dervish bowed his turbaned head. “Of course.” Even standing at ease here, he had an air of war about him. Zamia would have known that the little man could fight even had she not seen his handiwork against the ghuls the night before. The dervish’s confident grace as he moved, the hardness in his tilted eyes, the way his hand rested naturally on his sword-hilt—these were signs her father had taught her to recognize in an enemy or an ally.

Though she could not say why, Zamia found herself recalling the taunts that two of the boys in her band had made—never to her face—about her rough, ugly looks. They had been jealous of her power and renown, no doubt, but…. It had never mattered to her before whether their insults were rooted in truth.

The dervish was staring at her.

She scowled at the little man. “What is it?”

A tiny lizard darted across the rocky ground between them. Raseed eyed it for a moment but looked directly at her when he spoke. “I have been wondering about something, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi. From what the Doctor has told me, it is not your people’s way to seek help from the outside. I know that you have lost your band, but why have you not sought out the help of the other bands in your tribe? Angel-touched or no, you are young to be on your own so.”

“Young! I am five and ten! How much older are you, little man? Two years at most?” Zamia sucked her teeth in annoyance. But he is straightforward, at least, not like the Doctor with all of his words and smiles. The dervish held her eyes with his, and something powerful moved through her body.

“At our last tribal council my father’s band was water-shunned by the other bands of the tribe,” she said finally. “Because of me. Because he dared to name a girlchild Protector of the Band. And now—” she laughed bitterly, despite herself—“now I can’t even avenge my band, for no Badawi will answer my rally. And so I have failed as Protector.” Zamia finally stopped herself, not quite believing she had just spoken those words. Why are you telling this stranger about this? Because his scent is clean? Because you will fight beside him? The tribe’s business is the tribe’s, the band’s business is the band’s!

The dervish scratched beneath his blue turban. “But you—”

“We will speak no more of this,” she said firmly. “What of you, Raseed bas Raseed? Where is your kin? Why have you no family name?” She found that she could not quite keep the scorn from her voice. “No kin? No band? No tribe?” Her stomach clenched as she realized that the same could now be said about her.

The dervish sighed and then recited what seemed familiar words with a quiet intensity. “My name is Raseed bas Raseed—the old way of saying ‘Raseed, only Raseed.’ I am a dervish of the Order. I need no father among men, I need no brother among men, I need no son among men.” He drew up to his full height, which somehow seemed taller now. “God is my father, the forked swords of the Order are my brothers, virtue is my son.”

They were mad words, Zamia knew—for what was a person without family? Yet she found herself moved by them, and intrigued by their stern-faced speaker. Again shame crept up within her, wearing the bloody bodies of her kin. She had no right to be looking at a man so. She was the Protector of the Band, and she had failed. All that was left was giving up her life for vengeance. The road of wife and mother was not hers to walk.

But what if—God forgive her for daring to think it—what if she lived? She was the last of the Banu Laith Badawi and she bore the burden of keeping her band from dying out. She would need to marry and bear children for that to happen….

The confusing, shameful thoughts fled as Zamia scented the Doctor’s approach. A moment later she saw his big, white-clad bulk trundling under the rock overhang.

“All-Merciful God, is the holy man spitting pious sayings at you already?” he asked. “The sun is barely up! Don’t misunderstand me—his laconic little jewels are all inspiring enough the first couple of times you hear them. But after that they start to sound a bit pompous.”

Raseed made a small, unhappy noise in his throat. “Doctor. Please.” He sounded like a bullied boy.

The ghul hunter waved a conciliatory hand, and when he spoke Zamia heard annoyance and affection dance in his voice. “Oh, to be sure, Raseed is most useful to have around. The boy can cross a room in the space of a breath and—God is my witness!—I’ve even seen him kill a Cyklop!”

A Cyklop? Truly? Zamia’s desert-bound people knew little of the one-eyed giants of the mountains, but she had heard tales of their legendary strength. She risked a brief, impressed glance at Raseed. The dervish stood stock still, saying nothing.

The Doctor went on. “But, you see, Raseed thinks he is ‘wise beyond his years.’ I will tell you this, girl: There is no such thing as being wise beyond your years. One can only know as much as one has lived to know, though it is certainly possible to learn a great deal less than this. The boy entered the Order at a young age and has had a hard dervish’s life. He is more serious than most young men his age. How many of them, after all, learned to split rocks with their fists before they learned to shave? But rock-splitter or no, he is a young man who would do well to remember that fact more often.”

Fifty different feelings filled her. She kept her eyes on the ground and said, “We should be going.”

Seeming to speak to no one in particular, the dervish said quietly, “I am a young man, but as there is an elder amongst our number, one of us at least ought to act in a proper manner.” Zamia looked up and saw a tiny smile on the dervish’s pretty, birdlike face. Then he walked away, heading for the mules.

Clearly such retorts were rare, for the old man just stood there for a moment blinking in shocked silence, watching the dervish walk away. The ghul hunter turned to Zamia and let out a laugh that shook his broad shoulders and big gut. “Ha! ‘One of us ought to!’ Hee hee! ‘Dignified and proper!’ ” He shouted at Raseed’s back, “Indeed, boy, indeed! And since it clearly isn’t going to be me, it might as well be you!” The Doctor waggled his bushy grey eyebrows and gave Zamia a conspiratorial wink. “He hates it that I call him ‘boy,’ you know.”

“And I hate your calling me ‘girl,’ ” Doctor.

The old man gave an offended sniff. “Bah. I’ll tell you like I tell him—I call you youngsters as I like! I am, after all, old enough to be your grand-uncle, my dear.”

Zamia felt anger flare inside her as they turned to follow Raseed. “Before he died, my grand-uncle called me Protector of the Band.” Her mind’s eye conjured an image of her gnarled gray grand-uncle Mahloud, whose age had not diminished his skill at water-finding. The ghuls had killed him, too.

Again the memories hit her like a hammer blow to the stomach. Why could she not shut them out? She could not sit here and make herself sick with this mourning every few hours. Vengeance would never come from such weakness.

The old man said something, apparently repeating himself. The third time, Zamia actually heard him. “Are you all right, Zamia?”

She growled, low and long. She shoved weakness to the side. “I am fine, Doctor. Why are we standing here chattering? Were we not about to depart?”

The old man sighed a tired sigh and fell quiet. Zamia looked at him more closely.

She had watched as he destroyed three of the foul creatures which had so easily slain the fierce warriors of her band. She knew that he wielded great power. But as she looked at him now, a fat old man sweating heavily though the sun was hardly up, she saw none of the sorts of signs her father had taught her to watch for in a warrior. Being honest with herself, she knew she would not have been able to slay that massive ghul had its attention not been focused on the Doctor. But why had he seemed so helpless? Whistling and looking like he was half ready to die without caring whether he took his enemies with him. Having a ghul hunter on her side would improve her chances for revenge—she was not fool enough to think she needed no allies. But this old man….

And then there was the dervish. The Badawi were not as coy as villagers about the truths of man and woman. Though Zamia was Protector of the Band, the older women had taught her, the same as they had the other girls, of the things she had to look forward to. The things she would feel when she looked at a man, and the things she would do when wed. When she looked at Raseed, though, what she felt was confusion. The dervish was a powerful ally but a distraction. Her mind spun with contradictions.

Over the course of the morning they made their way along a road of packed dirt that grew broader and smoother the farther they went. The dervish offered her his mule. He meant no insult, she supposed. How could he know that a Badawi would ride nothing but a pureblood horse? Walking on a road was compromise enough.

Zamia walked two steps behind her new allies, trying to train her feet to the hard earth of the road. And trying to keep her troubled mind from spinning. The little party walked in silence, and Zamia found herself almost missing the Doctor’s inane, griping banter. Better than being alone with the painful pictures in her head.

They traveled for hours, the old man and Raseed occasionally exchanging a few words. Zamia largely ignored them as she dwelled on the knife in her pocket. She would never wield it herself, of course, but in a strange way it had become the most important thing on God’s great earth.

It was just afternoon when a strong wind-shift brought Zamia out of her grim thoughts. They were coming upon a large mass of men’s scents. A few minutes later the road—already the broadest Zamia had ever seen—passed between two large rocks to join another road, twice as wide. And it was as if they had stepped into a sandstorm of people. Zamia tried to look everywhere at once, the threatening scents of a dozen different strangers assaulting her. It was all she could do not to take the lion-shape. What is wrong with you? Did you react this way when the trading caravans met up with the band? She was without her father’s guidance now, but that was no excuse. Focus. You cannot panic at every pack of men that passes.

The three of them were absorbed into a dense but quick moving line of travelers that snaked its way toward Dhamsawaat. Zamia could see that the road continued straight ahead for a long stretch, then rose at a sharp angle with a massive, shrubby dune. The shrubs more or less covered the dunes now, instead of dotting them, which meant that they were coming close to water. A good deal of it, Zamia guessed from the increasingly dense web of brown-green. The River of Tigers, she thought. It must be nearby indeed.

A moment later, she saw the thick green ribbon of it in the distance. Zamia knew that outsiders thought the Badawi dazzled by the smallest stream. The idiots knew nothing of the beautiful brooks and springs that nurtured the great oases of the Empty Kingdom. But this big river, with its boats and the men fishing it… Zamia was dazzled, though she did all she could to hide it.

Across the river, were the farms and orchards that, as her father had taught her, sent their yields year in and year out to the hungry hordes of Dhamsawaat. Olives, dates, wheat, waxy earth-apples, small fields for pasture. This was as close as Zamia had ever come to Dhamsawaat. The Banu Laith Badawi were—had been, she corrected herself painfully—fiercely independent even for Badawi. Her band had had little contact with townsmen. But even an independent band sometimes needed things from other peoples—tools, fruits and grains, and, when wild pasture was hard to find, grazing for their animals. The Protector of the Band was expected to advise on all aspects of the band’s health, and she had accompanied her father several times to trade at the fairs that were sometimes held near here. But this close to Dhamsawaat, something was different. There was a… life that came from the city, and Zamia could already sense it.

They pressed on. The incline of the road was steep enough now, and the sun hot enough, that thick rivulets of sweat were pouring down the Doctor’s face. Zamia wondered again about doing battle alongside this fat old man. For the moment, she reminded herself, you have little choice—these two are the only allies you have in the world. It was a disturbing thought, but it soon flew from her mind. For then, the road crested the dune, and Dhamsawaat, King of Cities, lay before her.

Zamia stopped dead in her tracks and, for several long moments, could not speak. I see why this place is called the Jewel of Abassen, she thought, seeing the gleaming domes of turquoise and gold and white that dotted the carpet of buildings. I always thought father’s stories were exaggerated, but now I see he did not do the horrible size of this place justice.

It almost made her swoon. The buildings! She did not know how to begin counting them—flat, peaked, and domed, in stone and tile, a dozen different shades. And rising up as high as mountains! Above it all, near what seemed to be the center of the jumble—if it had a center—rose a huge white dome. Zamia was not much used to buildings and had trouble gauging the dome’s size, but she was certain that whatever building it topped must be bigger than some of the trade villages she had seen.

It had to be the legendary Crescent Moon Palace, the opulent home and stronghold of the Khalif and his family. Zamia’s people knew little of, and cared little for, the supposed ruler of all Abassen. The Badawi limited their interactions with city men as much as possible, wary of becoming bakgam tokens at best, or slaves at worst. Yet even among the Badawi the magnificence of the palace was known, and the few who had seen Dhamsawaat had confirmed that the stories did not exaggerate the splendor of the palace. Even from this distance Zamia could see that they had spoken truly.

Outside the great city walls, they came to two long buildings that stank powerfully of horses. There the Doctor handed the mules over to a stooped man wearing ridiculous city clothes. They then proceeded on foot, making their way through the city’s massive gates and into an even denser press of people. Zamia had to remind herself that this was not some feverish dream. There is so much stone and brick. The very air is thick with it! She forced herself to stop staring about like a sun-dazzled child.

More astonishing than the buildings were the people. If she had thought there was a great mass of them on the road into the city, she saw a hundred times more of them now as she passed through the streets. The densest gatherings of men Zamia had ever seen were the village and pilgrimage sites to the northeast. She’d been shocked when she saw those places, with their hundred roofs and buildings of two stories. But this—this was impossible. A riotous mix of clothing and complexions. It was terrifying. Men’s and women’s scents bled together with a thousand others, and countless people darted in and out of her peripheral vision.

How could she scent out enemies in a crowd like this?

“There are so many people here!” she said without meaning to.

“You should have seen it on our way out of here!” the old man bellowed. He turned to Raseed. “We’ll get home twice as quick, I think.”

Zamia had trouble imagining the streets being any more crowded. Veiled Rughali women lined the street, grinding sweet-smelling spice with pestles the size of war clubs. Girls in gemthread half-robes walked arm-in-arm with soft, wealthy-looking men. Two boys led small goats along the edge of the crowd. She even saw two men wearing the camel calf suede of Badawi tribesmen. She avoided their eyes, but they seemed more interested in the city itself than in the odd sight of a young tribeswoman alone in the Jewel of Abassen. Zamia tried to ignore all of the beast- and people-scents as best she could—the sights were confusing enough.

A hard-faced man jumped in her path. Zamia tensed for a fight, weighing the risks of taking the shape in this unfamiliar place. The man, smelling of deceit, shook a leather cup and screamed about triangle dice. Before Zamia could do anything, the Doctor elbowed the man away, spitting something about rigged games of chance. The man bowed mockingly and turned to his next potential player.

Again she resisted the urge to turn on her heel and run at lion-speed back into the desert. But she thought of her father, who had been to Dhamsawaat once in his youth. This gave her strength—If Nadir Banu Laith Badawi had visited this monstrous place and lived to tell the tale, surely his daughter could honor his memory by doing the same. Thoughts of her father and of his fate filled her with increasing resolution. She reminded herself that the path to vengeance—the only thing she lived for now—moved through this sandstorm of a city and its colorful carpet of… hundreds of people? Thousands? She did not have words for the number of people who must live in such a place.

They continued down the street slowly, the press of the crowd preventing them from moving any faster. Every few moments she looked to her left to make sure the Doctor was still there. She’d fought against the fiercest warriors of rival tribes. She’d killed a ghul. But Zamia found herself as frightened now as she’d ever been in her life. What if she were to get separated from the old man? How would she find her way back to him? Amidst the trackless dunes of the desert, she could follow anyone or anything. But here? With all of these buildings and carts and smells and sounds and people? This city could swallow me whole and no one would notice. She stepped even closer to Adoulla Makhslood, and her voice came out as a whisper.

“How many people live in Dhamsawaat?”

The old man smiled in a way that made her feel like a fool, though she did not think that was his intention. “My dear,” he began, “how many people were in your band?”

“Around fifty, most years.”

“And how many bands make up your tribe?”

“Around one hundred. We have a tribal council once every three years.” Her dry eyes stung with recalled tears of frustration as she thought of the last tribal council she’d attended, only one year ago. But despite the unjust treatment her band had received at the last council, Zamia swelled with pride remembering the huge masses at the gatherings of the Banu Laith. She raised her chin as she spoke. “The Banu Laith Badawi are a great tribe. Our numbers when we gather are fearsome. The gathered tents dot the dunes like…” She trailed off, realizing how ridiculous she was about to sound.

The old man cleared his throat, pretending not to notice her embarrassment. “Imagine your whole tribe gathered, then ninety-nine more tribes of the same size. Then, next to them, one hundred more tribes of the same size. Two hundred of your tribal gatherings next to each other and on top of one another. That is how many people are in the city before you.” The pride in his voice was unmistakable.

For a moment she thought the old man was lying to her. But why should he? Still, how could so many all live in the same place? How could they breathe? How could they move from place to place without going mad?

She asked the Doctor these questions, knowing she would sound naïve but not quite caring. The old man laughed and said, “Why, my dear, I go a bit more mad every time I step out my front door. That is the true test of a living city! Remind me to tell you about the time it took me two full days to get from the Lane of Monkeys to the Far Gardens!”

The crowd opened up a bit as the Doctor and the dervish led her through a great paved square lined with statues. Zamia was so focused on staying close to the Doctor that she took no real notice of the statues until she was right next to one. It was a depiction of one of the Angels, she realized. When she looked into its eyes, she froze in her tracks at the beauty she saw. The Banu Laith Badawi traded vigorously enough that small bits of the city carvers’ fine stone craftwork sometimes came into tribesmen’s hands, inevitably displayed with an untribesmanlike vanity and affectation that had always irritated Zamia. But the work here, on these statues—the way their eyes were full of life….

The Doctor tugged at her arm. “I know, child. Even after all these years, I am sometimes awestruck by their beauty. But let us move on.” Again he smiled with pride, as if he were a chieftain, and this city his band.

They walked a bit more, and the buildings they passed now were clearly the homes of poorer folk. People on the street called out greetings to the Doctor, eyeing Zamia curiously but asking no questions. They finally came to a stop before a tall building of whitish stone with two sad-looking clumps of thornclover sitting before it in earthen pots. Using a large iron key, the Doctor opened the front door. He stood there for a moment, then raised his palms skyward and smiled. “Thanks be to God that I am here to set foot on my doorstep again!” he bellowed.

As soon as they stepped inside, the old man sat down hard on a divan of dark wood and let out the loudest yawn Zamia had ever heard. He offered her a worn cushion that would have been a prized possession among the Banu Laith Badawi but was clearly not appreciated as such by a city man like the Doctor. The dervish disappeared into another room and returned with water in a cool jug and a plate of nuts and dried fruits. He lit a small olive oil lamp, and the mellow smell of it soothed Zamia. The trio nibbled and sipped for a few minutes before the dervish spoke.

“I fear I know already what your response will be, Doctor, but I would suggest that our next move should be to inform the Khalif’s men of this threat.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes. “If you know my response, boy, then there’s no need for me to say that the Khalif’s attentions on these matters would be more of a hindrance than a help.”

Zamia was sure she wore the same cynical look as the Doctor. She made a noise in her throat. “Even the Badawi know that the Khalif’s men are wicked, dervish! The dogs of Dhamsawaat care little for what has happened to the Banu Laith Badawi.”

“ ‘Dogs of Dhamsawaat’,” the Doctor repeated. “What is that, some savage scorn-name for city men? You do realize that I am a Dog of Dhamsawaat, do you not, girl? Yet you are ready enough to accept my help!”

Zamia kept herself from growling at the old man. “Your help, Doctor? Was it not I that saved you from that foul creature last night?”

“She has a point, Doctor,” the dervish chimed in, apparently giving up on his suggestion regarding the authorities. For only the second time, Zamia saw that hard-but-pretty, fine-featured face register amusement. Again she thought bitterly that, not long ago, had she met this man, her thoughts might have gone quickly to courtship. To the pride with which her father would have entertained the notion of such a match, and the grudging admiration the band would have had for his battle skill. But now such thoughts were useless. The band—the band’s memory—demanded the avenging lioness. The marriage-minded girl dishonored them.

The Doctor muttered about disrespectful children and ran a hand over the endless folds of his kaftan. Then he stood and began to pace. “Now. As I said last night, this business with the bloody knife is the purview of the alkhemists. My alkhemist friends are not home now, but we will call on them at first light. Then I will want you to meet another youngster who has lost kin to these same monsters. The two of you are the only ones to witness this threat, and it will help me to hear you speak again, side-by-side.”

Zamia could not contain her anger. “More talking!? We waste a day, old—Doctor! Surely there are others in this city with these skills.”

The old man shrugged. “A handful. But they all charge very dearly indeed. And they aren’t the types to take kindly to savage children who come barging into their shops telling them what they must do, as I’ve no doubt you would do.”

Zamia growled.

The old man only smiled. “Besides, not one of them is as good at what they do as Litaz is. Whatever time we lose in waiting we will more than gain back due to her aptitude. Now do try to settle yourself. We’ve much to do tomorrow. And as soon as we have a quarry we will begin the hunt.”

The Doctor’s smile turned hard. “You think me a lazy old oaf. And when I look at you I see an impertinent savage of a girl. But in the Name of God, our meeting in battle together brings the Heavenly Chapters to my mind: ‘O believer! Look to the accident that is no accident!’ We were meant by God to fight this bloody cruelty together, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi. And so we shall.”

The glint in the ghul hunter’s eyes gave Zamia the first real hope she’d felt in days. It was a vicious, bitter sort of hope, but it was all she had. Nadir Banu Laith Badawi’s band would be avenged.

For an hour or so Zamia lay half-dozing on a divan just inside the front door. It felt good, despite the dark thoughts that crept in at the edges of her ease. Then the Doctor announced that it was time to eat.

Zamia did not understand city people. A shriveled old woman who lived next door to the Doctor brought over plates of food. Though she looked nothing like him, Zamia assumed that she was his sister or his mother—why else would she live so close, and why would she feed him thus? But the woman did not stay to eat with them—and the Doctor gave her a coin before she left! It was as rude and shameless as anything Zamia had seen, but then, she had heard that city men paid coins for lovemaking as well.

The Doctor loaded his plate with thick slices of meat stuffed with a rich green dressing. “Pale wine and pistachio lamb! Thanks to All-Providing God that not everything He sends my way is a maddening trial!” The old man filled his cup, guzzled it down, refilled it. “Eat, girl!” he bellowed, bits of pistachio flying from his mouth as he gestured to the plates before him. “We’ll be on the move again soon enough, I fear. You’ll wish then that you had eaten!” He took another long gulp of pale wine.

Zamia tried to tell herself that she was not hungry—that she had no room in her for anything but revenge, though she knew it for a lie. The smells set her stomach growling as if the hungry, thirsty lioness within her were speaking up. With no further prompting from the Doctor, she sloshed back half her wine and began to stuff herself with mouthfuls of lamb. After a few bites, though, her stomach began to clench.

“This city food is too rich,” she said, then drained her cup with a second and third gulp.

The dervish smiled a mesmerizing smile. “I couldn’t agree more, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi. You will notice that I am eating only fruit and bread-and-beans. The diet of the pious.”

She found herself speaking. “You may call me simply Zamia, Raseed.” Where did that come from!? This cursed wine is too strong! The dervish mumbled something embarrassed-sounding and locked his eyes on his plate. He is older than me, yet he seems so young.

“Well,” the old man bellowed, tipsily breaking the tension, “such bird food is suitable enough, perhaps, for little holy men’s mouths. But not for a man of my…” he paused, hefting up his big belly with both hands, “a man of my… significance.” The ghul hunter turned to Zamia, a note of solicitude entering his voice. “I have spent long decades as a servant of God, you know. I’ve traveled roads this presumptuous boy has never even heard of. Forty years’ worth of days at war with the Traitorous Angel. Is it so wrong that I should wish to spend my nights like this?”

The old man took another big swallow of wine and turned back to Raseed with a troublemaker’s smile. “You’re as bad, sometimes, as those Humble Students you respect so much! Perhaps you should join their stupid little sect! Scandalized by ale and dancing and such!” He poked a reproving finger at Raseed. “Remember what the Chapters say: ‘God speaks through these Chapters, not through the mouths of priests. His scriptures are not written upon papyrus, parchment or vellum. They are marked in men’s memories, stamped on men’s hearts, engraved in men’s souls.’ Yet your Order and the Humble Students act as if the Chapters were written on their lips.”

He took another drink. “Before their glory faded from Abassen, the ghul hunters’ ways were unbending in some things. But at least they never claimed to be holy men. God is the Most Beneficent Host, boy! When you’ve forgotten that, you’ve forgotten why we fight!” His tirade over, the ghul hunter threw his hands up in exaggerated exasperation.

For a while then there were only the sounds of eating and the old man’s heavy breath. When the meal was done they sat there silently. Then the Doctor’s too-loud voice shattered the silence.

“Speaking of fighting,” he said as if ten minutes had not passed, “I have been wondering something, Zamia. If, God willing, we find this damned-by-God servant of the Traitorous Angel and we defeat him, what will you do then?” Zamia felt the pleasant haze of the wine burn away in an instant. Why does he bring this up now? It sounded to her as if the ghul hunter already knew what her answer would be, and disapproved of it.

“All that matters is that I kill whoever or whatever has done this. Likely I will die doing so. This is as it should be. Martyrdom for me, vengeance for my band.”

The winey cheer was gone from his voice. “Martyrdom? Are you so eager to die, Zamia?”

She came to her feet and hissed at the old man. “Why should I wish to live? Everyone I know is dead! My band is dead! I can only pray that my fate is to avenge them before I die myself!”

The Doctor stared at her, and his gaze was hard. “Remember that even fate has its forking roads. Your father saw the touch of the Angels upon you and chose you to be Protector of the Band, though you are female. He understood the Chapter that reads ‘Only so many fates for each man, but always a choice.’ ”

The Doctor poked idly at the single bean on his plate—the only bit of food that remained there. “But enough grim talk for now. We must see to what we city folk call your sleeping arrangements—and what the Badawi call ‘some random patch of sandy dirt.’ Oh, I am sorry, girl, I only jest. But of course we would not shame you by having you sleep in the house of a man not your husband or father. I don’t doubt my neighbor—the old woman who brought our dinner—will set a pallet for you. For a young woman such as—”

Zamia growled. “I am not a girl, Doctor. My father did choose me for Protector of the Band, and that is what I am. The Protector sleeps where he must. If you would be so kind to set a pallet here at the foot of the stairs, that will be fine.”

Beside her, the dervish made a strangled noise.

Zamia ignored him because she could not afford to lose control of herself. “What I want to know,” she asked, “is whether we are truly safe here, Doctor. I do not wish to wake to the feeling of my ribcage being cracked open. The one whose ghul pack we fought—what is to stop him from striking us here?”

The Doctor yawned and smiled patronizingly. “Sneaking ghuls about within a city is no easy matter, child. And besides, my home is charmed so that no ghul can cross its threshold.” The old man shoved his dirty plate rudely in Raseed’s direction and got up from the table. His lazy expression grew urgent again. “Listen to me. One of the Banu Laith Badawi still lives. When she dies, then your band is dead. Until that day, girl, your band lives.” He waggled a big finger at her and left the room.

She turned to where the dervish had sat, afraid but excited to be alone with him. But when she turned, the little man was gone. Something inside her twisted and untwisted in disappointment and relief.

A little while later, a great storm of things flew through Zamia’s mind as she lay on her pallet seeking sleep. The sight of her brother with his heart torn out and his eyes shining red. Her father’s hand, clutching a dagger. The sound of ghuls hissing. The smells of this strange city. Raseed’s brief smiles.

And the Doctor’s admonitions. Your band lives, he had said. She had already counted herself half-dead, she realized. She’d been acting as if the band of Nadir Banu Laith Badawi were gone from God’s great earth forever. The ghul hunter, with his city man’s love of this one building he called home, did not understand her people. He did not understand what she had lost. But he had started her thinking nonetheless.

Home, Zamia thought. For the nomadic Badawi, it was not a place. The strains of one of her people’s most important songs forced its way into her head. It would start with the boys singing,

Home is where my father is! I am a true Badawi!

Then the men would take their turn, singing

Home is where my sons are! I am a true Badawi!

Then all would sing together:

Home is where my band’s tents are! I am a true Badawi!

The song was a boastful one, intended to flaunt her people’s superiority to the soft villagers and city folk. But now it took on a mournful irony. Her father had joined her mother in death. She had no sons or daughters. The isolation of her band meant that no other band would take her in. How could she ever know a home again?

The burning need for revenge had pushed her far. But her body felt as if it would melt from exhaustion. There was nothing more she could do tonight. Nothing that is, but mourn all she had lost. And so, sure that she was out of the hearing range of her new-found allies, and more tired than she’d ever been, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, for the first time in years, very quietly cried herself to sleep.