Throne of the Crescent Moon (36 page)

But she sank her teeth deeper and deeper until she tore Mouw Awa’s throat out. The manjackal’s clawing briefly grew stronger, then stopped completely.

She choked, the foulest of foul tastes filling her mouth and nostrils. Without willing it, she shifted out of the lion-shape.

She rose shakily to her feet.

The shadows that Mouw Awa had seemed to be formed from swirled and rose like smoke. Some unseen, unfelt wind tattered the shadows until they were but dark wisps. Then the wisps themselves gusted into nothingness.

What was left on the palace floor was a man’s skeleton.
Hadu Nawas. The Child-Scythe.
Instead of a man’s skull, the corpse had the skull of a jackal. The sight brought to mind wind-stripped bones of the desert—and all she had lost among the sands.

She kicked the skeleton with a booted foot, and it instantly crumbled to dust. She closed her eyes against the agonizing pain of her wounds and sank back to the stone floor.

My band is avenged. The Banu Laith Badawi are avenged.

Zamia dared to tell herself that her father would be proud.

And then she was sick. Over and over again, until tears filled her eyes and her stomach ached, she was sick.

Raseed heard the Doctor scream and, heedless of whatever danger might lie ahead, shot forward as fast as his feet could carry him. He entered a vast columned room with a great dais at its center. He saw the corpses of the Khalif and a black-robed man—a court magus, he guessed—sprawled on the ground. A gaunt man in a filthy white kaftan stood above the corpses. Several skin ghuls were pounding on a wall of shimmering light.

Upon the dais was a high-backed throne of bright white stone. The Falcon Prince sat on the throne, hands clasped with a long-haired young boy by his side. Pharaad Az Hammaz was shouting. “It’s not working. IT’S NOT WORKING!”

Raseed didn’t know or care what the traitor was going on about. His attention was on the floor beside the dais, where Mouw Awa crouched over the Doctor, who screamed in pain.

He had to help his mentor. The manjackal was distracted and Raseed, moving faster than he’d ever moved in his life, flew at the thing.

But, fast as he was, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi was faster. A bolt of golden light, she shot past him, growling “This one is mine!” and barreled into Mouw Awa, knocking the manjackal from the Doctor.

Raseed spared a glance at the combatants, light and shadow battling in a tangle of claws and growls. Then he saw the man in the soiled kaftan—Orshado, it had to be—dash forward and calmly touch the wall-of-light. There was a flash of red, and the wall was gone. At a gesture from Orshado, the skin ghuls, no longer impeded, strode toward the throne.

Raseed reached the Doctor. Claw-marks had shredded the Doctor’s kaftan, though Raseed could see no blood. Around the rims of the Doctor’s eyes, Raseed could see a red that was brighter than bloodshot.

“Ministering Angels! Doctor, are you…What can I do?” he asked, ashamed to feel as frightened as he did.

“Raseed bas Raseed,” the Doctor said, his voice hollow and vacant. “A good man…a good partner.”

Raseed grabbed the ghul hunter by the shoulders. “Doctor, please! How can we kill these things?”

The Doctor’s bright brown eyes seemed to struggle against the red light that rimmed them. “Hunh? Be…behead. Stop skin ghuls!”

“I
did
behead one, Doctor, it just—”

“O…Orshado.” It was the last thing the Doctor said before he fell into some sort of sorcerous death-sleep.

Orshado. Then the ghul of ghuls himself must be beheaded!

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw gouts of magical flame—Litaz and Dawoud battling yet more skin ghuls. He didn’t know what had become of Zamia.

Raseed laid his mentor’s big limp body carefully upon the dais. He looked up and saw Orshado leap impossibly—magically—onto the throne itself. The ghul of ghuls backhanded Pharaad Az Hammaz with a, no doubt, sorcerous strength. The master thief dropped his sword and fell from the throne onto the dais. Then Orshado, one foot planted on the throne, grabbed the child—the Heir, Raseed realized—by his long, jet-black hair and dre Bk
row a knife.

He’s going to drink the Heir’s blood, just as that scroll said.

Orshado’s curved knife darted up and down, and the Heir screamed in pain. A red spray spattered Orshado’s kaftan.

At the same time, the half-conscious Falcon Prince spoke a single word and made a strange gesture. Then he reached past the bleeding Heir and pressed something on one of the throne’s armrests. Raseed heard a loud click and a groan of shifting stone.

Another secret that the Khalifs never learned of?
It seemed so, for below him the floor swiftly receded as the throne and the entire dais it sat on—with Raseed, the Doctor, the Heir, Pharaad Az Hammaz, and Orshado all on it—rose on some sort of column.

Raseed gave the Doctor’s limp form one last pained glance, then looked back to Orshado. The ghul of ghuls plunged his knife into the Heir’s chest a second time.

Raseed leapt toward the throne.
Almighty God, though I know I am unworthy, I beg You to grant Your servant strength!

He flew at Orshado. But the ghul of ghuls waved his hand, and then something strange—something
impossible
—happened.

The throne room around them ceased to be. Where stone walls and ceiling had been there was only swirling red light. Raseed’s companions were gone. Orshado and his monsters were gone. Raseed was alone.

What foul magic is this?

Raseed looked around frantically, trying to find a ceiling, a floor, or a door. But there was only the churning whorl of red light.

He went into his breathing exercises, and with them came a degree of calm. He recited scripture. “Though I walk a wilderness of ghuls and wicked djenn, no fear can cast its shadow upon me. I take shelter in His—”

The Heavenly Chapters died on Raseed’s lips as a man appeared before him.

The man carried a spear. He was roughly dressed and had a gruesome sword wound through his middle. He should not have been able to stand. Something about his face was familiar to Raseed…

One of the highwaymen!
When Raseed had first left the Lodge of God two years ago, he had been ambushed by three highwaymen on the long road to Dhamsawaat. He had slain them with ease.

This was the first man Raseed had ever killed.

The man looked at Raseed with empty eyes and spoke.

“‘O BELIEVER! KNOW THAT TO MURDER ANOTHER MAN IS TO MAKE GOD WEEP!’”

At the sound of that voice quoting from the Heavenly Chapters, Raseed froze in fear. The man’s mouth moved, but the voice that spoke the scripture was Raseed’s own—the doubting internal voice he often heard in his head.

As the man spoke, the other two highwaymen whom Raseed had killed on that day appeared. One had half his head missing, the other
bled from his chest. They joined in the chanting, each speaking in Raseed’s own voice.

“‘O BELIEVE Bkeed the otherR! KNOW THAT TO MURDER ANOTHER MAN IS TO MAKE GOD WEEP!’”

Another mangled man blinked into existence beside Raseed. The magus Zoud, who had been kidnapping women, wedding them, then feeding them to his water ghuls. Raseed had killed the man on his first ghul hunt with the Doctor.

“‘O BELIEVER! KNOW THAT TO MURDER ANOTHER MAN IS TO MAKE GOD WEEP.’”

Another wicked man whom Raseed had slain appeared. Then another. As one, the dead men stepped toward him. And at last Raseed felt movement return to his limbs.

He slashed out with his sword at the closest form, but the forked blade whistled through the highwayman as if through empty air. He feared the touch of those dead men’s hands more than he had ever feared anything, though he could not say why. He backed away step by step, keeping his eyes on them.

Behind him he heard a great whoosh of fire. He felt his blue silks singeing. Prying his eyes from the dead men, he turned toward the horrible heat. He saw a vast chasm filled with water-that-was-fire.

The Lake of Flame! I have been consigned by God to the Lake of Flame!

The dead men advanced. Raseed backed away a few more steps and felt the heat at his back begin to scald his skin. From nowhere and everywhere he heard a soft weeping that sounded like the universe being torn in two.

But then, beneath that, he heard another voice. Dim and distant, he heard Doctor Adoulla Makhslood’s words from moments ago.

“Raseed bas Raseed. A good man…a good partner…”

Raseed clung to the words as if they were the sheltering embrace of God Himself. He found power in them.

No. This flame is not real. These men are dead. I have served Almighty
God as best I can. I have failed at times, but “Perfection is the palace in which God alone lives.”

Around Raseed, the thick, roiling red glow wavered and seemed to thin. The dead men disappeared. For the briefest of moments, he saw a gaunt figure in a soiled kaftan before him.

Orshado! This is
his
doing, not God’s!

It lasted only an instant, and then the dead men were on him again, herding him toward the Lake of Flame. Raseed felt his flesh burn but he stifled his screams.

He forced focus upon his thoughts as he never had before. He pictured the Doctor, Litaz, and Dawoud. He pictured Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, who had dared to speak to him of marriage. He thought of the flaws they all had and the good they had done. And he heard himself chanting.

“‘Perfection is the palace in which God alone lives. Perfection is the palace in which God alone lives. Perfection is the palace in which God alone lives.’”

Again the churning red light wavered and thinned. Again he saw Orshado standing there.

Raseed flew forward, the chant on his lips, his head filled with thoughts of his friends. The red light dispersed. The dead men did not return. He slashed his sword at Orshado, and felt as if he were breaking through a brick wall.

He heard the gurgling scream of a man with no tongue. Then he was in the throne room again, on the rising dais. The Heir lay bleeding on the throne and Orshado stood before Raseed, clutching his temples in pain. It was as if time had stood still while he’d faced the death-specters.

The agony they’d caused was still with him. Pain blazed through Raseed’s body, and his back burned. But he forced himself forward, slicing out again with his sword as he did so.

Manjackal, sand ghuls, skin ghuls. Again and again these past few days, Raseed’s sword arm had proven too weak to vanquish the creatures
of the Traitorous Angel. But now he felt filled with God’s power. He was the Weapon of the Wisely Worshipped.

This was the moment that he had lived his whole life for.

The force of Raseed’s blow carried him and Orshado both away from the throne and over the edge of the dais, which had now risen halfway to the ceiling. They plummeted to the floor as Raseed’s sword sliced through the ghul-of-ghuls’ neck.

The man in the soiled kaftan made no noise, even as he died.

Raseed felt his bones break as he hit the stone floor. He cried out in pain, but in his mind he heard only the Heavenly Chapters.
God is the Mercy that Kills Cruelty.

Beside him he saw Orshado’s headless corpse twitch once and fall still.

Raseed tried to stand but felt the pain pulling him down into darkness. He watched the dais—with the Doctor, the Heir and the Falcon Prince still on it—rise on a notched column of marble carved to look like the scaled length of a cobra. A stone block in the ceiling slid aside. The throne ascended through the resultant hole, the underside of the dais fitting perfectly into it. There was another loud sound of grinding stone and the contraption stopped moving.

For another astonished moment, Raseed just stared at the ceiling that had swallowed the Doctor. He noted with satisfaction that the skin ghuls were all falling to the ground.

Then the pain blazed again and darkness took him.

Adoulla Makhslood felt as if a great gray boulder were crushing down upon his soul, smashing to bits everything within him that had ever been happy. He half-sensed things happening around him—a lion running by, bursts of fire in the air, the soft footsteps of a man in a filthy kaftan, his own mouth mumbling words to a man in blue—but they meant nothing to him. He felt that he was dying and that he was being shoved from the sheltering embrace of God. In all his years on God’s great earth, he had never felt such despair.