Throne of the Crescent Moon (26 page)

Litaz broke the silent moment. “The Father of the Universe does not tell us to beat frightened girls,
brother!
Can your kind can find no other way in which to spread virtue?”

One of the big men began to slap his club against his open palm. He moved two steps closer to Litaz. The men were nearly in swinging range now, and Raseed took two long strides closer. The gray-haired man shot Raseed a warning look then spoke more calmly to Litaz. “Such rude words. Come, woman.
Old and withered or young and hale, all must live by His words.
Come and be chastised. It will be quick and feather light for one so small as you, I swear in the name of God.”

Litaz laughed a bitter little laugh. “Come try and
chastise
me, brother. You’ll end up lying in the street.”

Everything happened at once.

The two hook-nosed Students lurched at Litaz. They were not fighting men. That was clear enough to Raseed. No need for his sword. He blocked the assailant closest to Litaz and thrust a fist out.

Raseed didn’t realize he’d decided his loyalties until the man was lying bloody-nosed and unconscious on the ground.

For what seemed the thousandth time that week, Raseed’s stomach lurched with the wrongness of his actions, but he looked up, ready to do the same to the other two Students. Litaz stood between him and them. He froze as he saw the alkhemist was offering up the jeweled pommel of her dagger to the men.
She’s surrendering her weapon?

The leader hesitated, confusion and rage battling on his beardless face. “What—?” he said.

The dagger’s pommel-stone hissed. A jet of bright green vapor shot forth, a small cloud of it seeming to wrap around each man’s head. Litaz spryly jumped back a few steps, dodging a few clumsy club swings. On the edges of the cloud, Raseed felt the vapors sting his eyes and nostrils.

The Students reacted more dramatically. They slid coughing to the cobblestones, the bigger man’s wooden club clattering as he fell. A moment later, all three men fell still as corpses. They were breathing, though barely, Raseed’s keen senses told him.

Litaz coughed a hacking cough a few times, and Raseed echoed it, wincing at the acrid green smoke that was already dissipating on the clear morning air. The alkhemist brushed some sort of residue from her dagger-hand onto the skirt of her dress. It left a little green-black stain. Litaz looked down at the unconscious Students with grim satisfaction, and there was no mistaking her pride in her handiwork. She carefully sheathed her dagger, looked at Raseed and shrugged her shoulders.

“‘Lying in the street.’ I warned them, did I not?”

“Auntie! How? What?”

“A rare solution called the Breath of Dargon Loong.”

“Like the monster from the stories?”

Litaz shrugged again. “Yes. Though, to hear Adoulla tell it, the Dargon Loong is real enough, even if most think him a mere story.”

Only then did Raseed notice the several onlookers who now darted away from the scene. Raseed began to warn Litaz of the danger she had gotten herself into but thought better of it.
She has pulled you into it, too,
his doubting voice told him. He looked down at the immobilized Students.
I
am
on the right side of this,
he told himself.
I
am!

“Let us keep moving, Auntie,” was all he said.

Her confident grin slipped, and for a moment she looked every bit an old woman. “Listen, Raseed. I am playing brave about this because I have just assaulted the Humble Students. This is going to bring trouble to my already troubled house.” A sadness entered her eyes. “O God, please let them be safe!” She clearly was not speaking
of the Students. “Raseed, if that creature, that manjackal, strikes again…” She left the thought unfinished and gestured to Raseed that they should walk on.

Eventually, Litaz brought them to a hei them to halt at the threshold of an elegant two-story inn of green glazed brick. Huge lattice screens hid the inn’s courtyard from the eyes of passersby. They stepped through a small open section of the screen into that courtyard, which was decorated with twin fountains of almost translucent marble. Two big, well-dressed men ushered them into the inn itself.
Guards,
Raseed guessed, though they acted more like hosts and wore no visible weapons. They respectfully took his sword from him, promising to return it upon his departure. He noted approvingly that they handled the weapon with a proper reverence.

The greeting room of the inn was massive, almost as open and airy as the courtyard. A dozen parties sat at low tables of white wood worked with tortoise shell. Litaz smiled and waved to a fat man at a round table, hard against the far wall. The wall was dominated by a jade and emerald gemthread tapestry depicting a verdant grove of olive trees. The fat man, alone at the table, waved back, smiling cheerfully at Litaz as they approached. He looked as if
he
were an olive. The almost greenish sheen of his complexion matched the tapestry, and he was little, as short as Raseed, but egg-shaped and strangely sleek skinned despite being of an age with Litaz. To top off the effect, he wore rich, dark green silks.

“Lady Litaz Daughter-of-Likami!” As they approached, the olive man leered at them, stood, and bowed, making fussy noises all the while. Raseed gave a slight but respectful nod. Litaz embraced the man warmly. “You’ve kept me waiting, wonderful one. But the Ministering Angels know any wait would be worth it.”

Litaz’s smile was bright. Raseed found that he was not cunning enough to determine whether or not it was a false smile. “Beloved Yaseer,” she said, and grazed the man’s forearm with her small hand. “I am very sorry we are late, old friend. We ran into a little trouble on the way here.”

Yaseer waved away an invisible trifle. “Not at all, my dear, not at all.
I will refrain from asking you what sort of trouble. No doubt it’s best that I don’t know. No doubt.”

Raseed did not like this too-smiling fool with his shifty movements and shifty words. But he kept silent, forcing his features to neutrality.

Yaseer did not return the favor. The man’s smile dropped as he looked Raseed over, and he frowned a puzzled frown. “Who have you brought with you, Lady? I’ve never known you to need a bodyguard, excepting that sour-faced husband of yours.” Yaseer stared rudely at Raseed but still spoke to Litaz. “Is he
truly
a holy man? You are a friend of the dervishes now? You who once told me they were the pompous peacocks of the—”

“That is enough, Yaseer!” the alkhemist broke in. She flashed an apolo
getic glance at Raseed.

The olive man spread his soft-looking hands, the picture of openness. “As you will, my dear, but you know I don’t discuss business with strangers. Especially not the clean-shaven sort that use forked swords ‘to cleave the right from the wrong in men.’ You will have to tell your virtuous bodyguard to leave.”

Raseed took an angry half-step forward before he remembered himself. Somehow he kept his voice level. “I will not leave her alone if—” he began.

Litaz put her blue-black hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. ȁidttly. ,Raseed, please.”

There is too much at stake to be stiff-necked now
. He bowed his head in acquiescence and found himself wishing for some reason that the Doctor were there right then. “I will wait by the door, Auntie,” Raseed said.

“Thank you, dear.”

Raseed moved to the inn’s entrance. He grasped for a swordhilt that wasn’t there. Then he waited, his thoughts still racing, his soul still uneasy.

L
ITAZ REMAINED STANDING and watched Raseed move to the corner of the inn’s greeting room. She was agitated. She could not stop thinking about the encounter with the Students and the trouble it might bring. She had not killed anyone today. She had not even really harmed anyone—the Breath of Dargon Loong was essentially harmless and only rendered its victims unconscious for a few hours at most. Still, she had made dangerous enemies. Given the chance, Litaz knew, the Students would be brutal in their retribution. The fact that it was only their pride that was wounded would not make them go lightly on her. But what had her options been, after all? To let the girl be whipped like an animal?

She turned to Yaseer and forced herself back into tranquility. The encounter with the Humble Students had been an hour ago. And there was work to be done in the present.
Best to get this over with
.

She made her tone businesslike but gracious as she spoke. “I am pleased the messenger got my note to you. And that you were able to fulfill such an unusual request so quickly.”

Yaseer was listening to her but was not-so-subtly watching Raseed, craning his neck to get a better look at the dervish. The spell-seller’s smooth features crinkled in troubled scrutiny, then returned to Litaz with a warm, and she was fairly certain, unfeigned, smile.

“Hm. I’m glad to see you are still in one delicious piece, O-Eyes-of-Starlight! Your message made me think you were in mortal danger. ‘Emergency,’ ‘Most crucial,’ ‘Our city threatened’—these sorts of words
filled your little letter. You had me up all damned-by-God night, O Breath-of-Roses! And it was
remarkably
expensive scribing this spell—powdered emeralds, those damned-by-God ink mushrooms that only the Banu Kassim Badawi-trained camels can sniff out! Such things are far from trifles, even to one with as much coin as the eternally heartbroken spell-seller before you. ‘What could be so crucial about some dusty old scroll in thrice-ciphered hidden script that she would need my cipher-spells so damned-by-God quickly?’ I asked myself. ‘And why should I do this, when I know I won’t even be able to bring myself to charge her what I ought to?’ For love?”

The wounded lover was a half-serious role that Yaseer had always played around her. She couldn’t help but smile. For a sweetly painful moment, she thought about what life with such a robust man would be like. She was glad that Dawoud had not come.
He would be furiously jealous right now.
As she thought of her husband, Litaz’s smile faded, and the weariness returned.

“But you have never been a woman to scream ‘ghul’ when noeertly t monster is about,” Yaseer continued, “‘There must be something to it,’ I said to myself, ‘if she is in such a lather over this.’ You have always been a woman of sense, save for your refusal to marry me.”

She thought of that years-ago time, just after the one trip home she and Dawoud had ever taken. Of finding the cologned letter with Yaseer’s scandalous proposal to her—her, a woman already betrothed. She had barely kept Dawoud from killing the man. “I was already married when you asked me, Yaseer.”

Again the plump man waved away something invisible and unimportant. The long-bearded owner of the inn directed his servants in setting out an array of plates, and he bowed obsequiously to Yaseer the whole while. When the host withdrew, Yaseer shook himself as if waking up from a bad dream.

“Oh, my dear, forgive me. Breakfast is served. Will you join me?”

Spread before the spell-seller was a breakfast that would have made Adoulla whimper in joy. Medallions of clove-and-mint mutton, poached pigeon eggs, honey-fried colocasia roots, fine grain date porridge, hundredflake
teacakes, dark and light teas, and two-fruit nectar. Litaz was not the eater Adoulla was, but the fight earlier had made her ravenous, and the dozen layered aromas made her stomach rumble. But she would not share a full meal with Yaseer. Too many invisible snares.

She measured the proper response as if she were in her workshop, filling a notched bottle. “I am afraid I have little time, my friend. I am in a great hurry.” She bobbed her head deferentially, and the rings in her twistlocks clinked lightly. “But I will take a teacake, if you do not mind?” She could not be utterly rude if she was doing business with the man. She sat at the white wood table, plucked up a hundredflake cake, and nibbled at it. It was delicious, and she had to resist devouring it as ravenously as her body told her to. “Thank you.”

Yaseer shrugged his fleshy shoulders, the green silk of his shirt rippling. He smiled naughtily and gestured toward the corner of the room where Raseed now stood. His tone was conspiratorial. “So. A dervish, is it? And young enough to be your baby boy. Is it true what they say? That they shave
everywhere
?” Again the olive oil smile. “No, no, don’t answer, don’t deny. I’m just happy to see that you
do
have some scandal left in you, my dear. I am so very glad to know that you are enjoying life despite your muck-and-hovel, care-for-the-poor lifestyle. A lithe little baby boy of the Order, forked sword and all! Name of God! It’s so decadent I’m almost inclined not to be jealous. Ahh, but I can see I’m embarrassing you. How are you, anyway?”

Finally, Yaseer had to stop for breath. Litaz refused to be drawn in to the banter, and she jumped into the brief silence with the most polite directness she could muster. “As I said, Yaseer, I am in a hurry. I
am
sorry. I am doing just fine, though, praise be to God. Speaking of enjoying life, you seem to be doing quite well for yourself. That brooch alone could feed a family for a year. Who have
you
been working for?”