Again she tried to take the shape and again felt as if she were trying to breathe sand. She stifled her tears, though, and shakily brought herself to her feet. From another room she heard voices—the Doctor’s, Litaz’s, Dawoud’s. Zamia’s steps were slow and awkward. She followed the sound of the voices to the room adjoining the sitting room.
The room was crowded with things and people. A shelf of books, racks of bottles, and strange tubes made of glass. The only relatively clear surface was a large table made of some strange metal. The Doctor’s white-kaftaned bulk was perched on a low stool, and Raseed leaned against the wall beside him. Litaz sat in a tall chair before this table, her husband hovering over her shoulder, both of them looking at a massive wood-bound book that lay open there. Beside the book was a bizarre brass and glass apparatus. One part of the thing looked like a small claw, and Zamia saw that this claw clutched her father’s knife. Litaz was looking into another part of the device—shaped like a huge eye—and evidently comparing what she saw to the figures and words in the book.
Study, the memorization of plants, the intricacies of the stars. For years, her father had tried to teach her that these were a part of being Protector of the Band. “Patience, little moon, is a warrior’s virtue,” he would say. “Your strength alone is not enough. You must have knowledge, too, little rose. And judgment. And, as I say, little emerald, patience.” Though she was always ‘Protector’ when there were others to overhear, in private her father had perhaps a dozen “little” nicknames for her. She loved the way he’d peppered his speech with them, even as he had raised her to be a warrior.
Her father’s greatest worry had been that Zamia was too lion-like. “You’d do well to spend more time learning the townsmen’s letters and less time stalking sandfoxes! There are many ways in which the Protector must defend the band,” he’d said just a fortnight ago, looking so disappointed that it hurt Zamia inside. Just to make her father happy, she had tried to pay attention to the book full of meaningless marks as he tried to teach them to her. Had tried hard. But try as she might, she was not made for such things.
Her new allies all looked up as they heard her approach. Raseed stopped leaning on the wall and took a step toward her before he seemed to stop himself. The Doctor’s eyes were wide, perhaps surprised that she was on her feet. Litaz looked at her with the same puzzled face that she’d worn when looking through that glass eye.
The old magus, though, was the first to speak. “Name of God, child, you should be resting! How is it that you’re on your feet? God’s balls, how is it that you’re awake? You should be heal-sleeping for another two or three days!”
Litaz bit her lip, looking as if she were still puzzling something out. “The touch of the Angels,” the alkhemist said. “Amazing. Clearly, the power God’s ministers granted you goes beyond your lion-shape. Even with our healing magics helping, you should not have been able to walk for a week.”
Zamia raised her chin just a bit. “Perhaps we ‘savages’ are more resilient than the soft townsmen you are used to treating, Auntie.”
The Doctor made a farting noise with his mouth and laughed. “Yes, yes, surely it is the innate bravery of the Badawi at work here, girl.”
Before Zamia could respond, Raseed was at her side. “ ‘God’s mercy is greater than any cruelty,’ ” he quoted from the Heavenly Chapters. “You were grievously wounded, Zamia. Praise God that you are recovering swiftly, but still you ought to be resting now, for—”
Litaz made an irked noise. “Please,” she said to Raseed, “don’t give advice when you know not of what you speak. The best thing for Zamia now is not to sleep. The crimson quicksilver is reawakening her blood, just as it is the blood on this knife. If she can walk, let her. And speaking of blood, she has a right to see whatever answers we may glean here.” The Soo woman turned to Zamia and gestured to the only other stool in the room. “Sit. I was just making the final adjustments to my scrying solution. I was asking the men, but you’d know better than they—when you wounded this Mouw Awa creature, did it bleed?”
Zamia forced herself to think of those few moments that had nearly killed her. Of her fangs digging into that monster’s foul flank. It had been both like and unlike tearing into flesh. There was shadow and pain but…“No, Auntie. No, it did not bleed.”
“As I told you,” the Doctor said, stroking his beard in thought. “The girl also said that to her remarkable senses, the blood on this knife smelled of neither man nor animal, whereas this Mouw Awa smelled of both. As I’d suspected, this must be the blood of the one who made those ghuls. The one whom that monster called ‘blessed friend.’ ”
“Well, whatever its source, it is the strangest blood I have ever seen. Full of life and lifeless. All of the eight elements are here, but they are… negated somehow. Sand and lightning, water and wind, wood and metal, orange fire and blue fire! How could they all be in one drop of blood, and yet not be there?” The little woman turned to her husband. “Stranger still, within the clots there are creeping things moving about. It is as if this blood came from some mix of man and ghul. It makes no sense. Still, my love, you should work your magics here. God willing, they may give us better answers.”
Using a tiny silver spoon, the alkhemist scooped a bit of white powder from a jar into a glass vial filled with red liquid. The liquid began to bubble and froth and turned bright green. Litaz then took this liquid and poured it over the bloodied knife that had been Zamia’s father’s.
A bright green light began to shimmer off of the knife. The light grew brighter and brighter until it filled the room.
“You can begin,” the Soo woman said to her husband. “Stand back,” she said to the others, doing so herself as she spoke.
The magus stepped forward, placing his gnarled hands a hairsbreadth above the knife. An eerie green light began to glimmer about his fingers as they weaved back and forth around the blood-stained blade. The old Soo’s eyes rolled back, and he chanted a wordless chant in an oddly echoed voice. Wicked magics, Zamia thought. Instinctively, she started to take the shape…
And of course found that she couldn’t. Panic rose in her again—she could feel the shape just beyond her reach, and feel the pain of her wound keeping her from her lion-self. Almighty God, I beg you, help me!
But then the magus was speaking, and she had to heed his words, for that was the path to vengeance for the Banu Laith Badawi. Tears burned in her eyes, but again she shoved thoughts of the shape aside and listened.
“This blood is like… like the cancellation of life,” Dawoud said as his long dark fingers darted back and forth above her father’s knife. “More than that, the cancellation of existence. Like the essence of a ghul, whose false soul is made of creeping things. But with will. Cruel, powerful will.”
The Doctor spoke quietly to Litaz, as if Zamia and Raseed were not there. “This all makes a horrible sort of sense, when I think on it. There’s an old tale of a man called the ghul of ghuls—a man who was like a ghul raised by the Traitorous Angel himself. A man who’d cut out his own tongue to better let the Traitorous Angel speak through him. Who had his soul emptied, then filled with the will of the Traitorous Angel. He is supposed to wear a kaftan that can never be clean and—”
The Doctor fell silent as Dawoud’s head tilted back and the magus grimaced as if in great pain. The old Soo was touching the knife now with his fingertips, and he screamed.