Throne of the Crescent Moon: Chapter 1

 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 guards- man’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. Al- most. 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 him- self 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 ser- vant, 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 guards-man 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.

ONE

Dhamsawaat, King of Cities, Jewel of Abassen

A thousand thousand men pass through and pass in

Packed patchwork  of avenues, alleys, and walls

Such bookshops and  brothels,  such schools and such stalls

I’ve wed all your streets, made your night  air my wife

For he who tires of Dhamsawaat tires of life

OCTOR 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 small- ish 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 broad- est 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 fo- cused 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 sup- posed. 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, be- fore 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 fort- night 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 in- volved 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 dur- ing 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.