He stepped out onto the Mainway, ignoring the hawkers’ shouts. For half a moment he toyed with the idea of hiring a sedan chair. But it was only toying. In all his years in Dhamsawaat, Dawoud had only ridden in one a handful of times. As with other things, his wife had been able to move from the Soo way to the Abassenese with more ease. When she was not with him she often hired chairs. Being a rich Blue River girl prepared her for having men carry her on their backs, he supposed with a snort, dodging past a bowlegged pistachio seller.
For an honest Red River Soo like himself, such a way of moving through crowds was simply wrong. Not doing so on the way to the palace, though, meant a long, hard walk. At least the day promised to be a cool one.
He walked for an hour and a half down broad roads before turning down Poulterer’s Row, which was packed with people preparing for the Feast of Providence. Every neighborhood in the city had a chicken seller, of course, but on Poulterer’s Row one could peruse the rare delicacies of the great master merchants: purple partridge, sun-dove, heron-stuffed swan. It was also the only place in all of Dhamsawaat that one could buy a pickled ostrich egg from the Republic. The smells of death and feather were thick here, and Dawoud was seized by a dry retching. He sat for a moment and gave a copper fals to a water seller who poured from his skin a cup of water so welcome it made Dawoud thank God aloud.
After yet another hour of his sandals slapping stone and packed dirt, Dawoud made it to the western gates of the Crescent Moon Palace. It had been a couple of years since he had been down this way, and he found himself newly dazzled by the building’s brilliance. Rising from the great white dome on a thin spire of gold was a sculpture of a man on horseback wielding a long lance. The head of the statue was changed to resemble each new Khalif. Dawoud realized he’d not been to the Palace since the new Khalif had taken the Throne of the Crescent Moon.
The statue gleamed, showing the lean-featured Khalif’s martial prowess against God’s enemies. Of course, everyone in Dhamsawaat knew that the new Khalif, like his father, had never once been in battle in his pampered life. It was the kind of hypocrisy that made Adoulla choke on his breakfast, but Dawoud wasn’t much bothered by it. Matters of state were about hypocrisy as much as anything else. The Soo people understood this as a simple fact that needn’t be condemned—a thing that simply was.
Dawoud approached the squat stone guardhouse that stood beside the gate. Calling on Roun Hedaad meant getting word to him by way of a helpful watchman. Dawoud did not have Adoulla’s total scorn for the Khalif’s men, but he did know that most of them could not be truthfully described as helpful. A pair of them exited the guardhouse and walked by, wearing steel-studded leather jerkins and displaying the slim maces that were their weapon of office. They eyed Dawoud as they did everyone they passed—with a vaguely menacing squint, ready, almost eager, for trouble. Dawoud gave these two a deferential old-mannish nod and sought out the least hostile looking watchman he could find: a lanky boy with soft eyes.
“God’s peace, young man. I must get in touch with Captain Hedaad immediately regarding an urgent matter.”
The boy said, more politely than Dawoud expected from a watchman, “If you’ve got a complaint about the watch, Uncle, I’m afraid you’ll need to take it to the eastern gates office. They’ll get you an audience with a vice captain and in a few days perhaps—”
“Forgive me, young man, but this is not a matter that can wait. My name is Dawoud Son-of-Wajeed, and I am well-known to Roun. I promise you that if you give him my name he will want to see me right away.”
The boy fixed those soft eyes on Dawoud, trying to somehow spy out ill intent. He put an idle hand on his mace and scratched his nose. “Well-known, huh?” Another long look. “Fine. But you’d better not be jerking me about here, Uncle.”
Dawoud inclined his head graciously.
Half an hour later a different watchman led Dawoud into a small chamber just inside the palace proper. The room was crowded with grain sacks and coils of chain, but there was a small divan in the corner. The watchman gestured to it gruffly, then left. No sooner had Dawoud settled gratefully down onto the dark wood than Roun Hedaad’s wide frame filled the doorway.
Dawoud started to stand, but the Captain of the Guard kept him from doing so. He bent down to embrace Dawoud and they exchanged greetings. Then Roun sat beside him.
The squat man had always seemed to Dawoud to be cut from a block of brown stone. There was the slightest bit of gray in his thick black moustache now and a few tiny lines at his eyes. But he looked as hard as ever, as did the masterwork four-bladed mace at his side.
“Thank you for making time to see me, Captain.”
The man scratched his club-shaped nose. “I can always make time for a man who saved my life.”
Dawoud waved a dismissive hand. “Well, my wife’s tonics had as much to do with that as anything. Besides, we were paid a good price for our work then.”
“Fair enough. So what is it you have come here to ask then, Uncle?”
If it were Litaz here, she’d have planned all of the words to use here. But that was not how he did things. “You know some of the strange, cruel magics my wife and I once made a life of fighting,” he said to the Captain of the Guard. “I’ve come to you because such a threat is loose in Dhamsawaat now.”
Dawoud told what little they knew of Mouw Awa and his master Orshado. The names. The killing they had done. As he told his tale, the captain’s unsubtle face was easy for Dawoud to read—shifting from annoyed disbelief to deeper consideration to half-skeptical fear. But the captain was respectful enough not to interrupt.
“All I ask,” Dawoud began, then fell silent when a richly-dressed page came darting in. The page ignored Dawoud and whispered something to the captain. Dawoud’s old ears could only make out the words he wants, your turn, and Roun’s protests, before the boy left the room.
Roun grimaced at him. “Well, Uncle, you’re in luck—His Holiness asks me on occasion to bring before him whatever security matter I am dealing with at a given time. He does the same with his ministers of treasury and his under-governors. He does it to show his active interest and to let the many arms of his government benefit from his wisdom.” There was no irony in Roun’s voice—indeed, the Captain made an admirable effort to infuse the words with sincerity, but Dawoud needed no magic to tell the man’s true feelings.
Still, this may be for the best. Perhaps the Khalif will actually listen.
Dawoud was shown not into the Court of the Crescent Moon, but into a small audience chamber. “Small” for the Crescent Moon Palace, of course, meant that the room was larger than Dawoud’s whole house, but it felt different from the publicly visible parts of the palace Dawoud had seen. Here the auras of opulence and command did not exactly diminish, but they took on a kind of intimacy. This was a place for a powerful man to pretend he was lending his ear. Almighty God willing, he will lend it in truth.
Dawoud was announced with a string of the tepid pleasantries spent on common people. The court-speaker boomed in his baritone that the guests were honored to be in the presence of “God’s Regent in the World, the Defender of Virtue, the Most Exalted of Men, His Majesty the Jabbari akh-Khaddari, Khalif of Abassen and of all the Crescent Moon Kingdoms.” Then, in unison with Roun, Dawoud knelt and bowed as deeply as his weak limbs would let him.
High windows displayed Names of God in glass ground with emerald and opal. No noise from the palace bustle outside came through the plush brocade drapes. Off to one side, court musicians played reed pipes and two-stringed fiddles, all plated in platinum. Thick carpets of puzzlecloth, worked over and over again with the Khalific seal, muffled the sound of footfalls. At the far side of the room, just below the ceiling, a strange gold lattice box, the size of a small carriage, protruded from the wall just above head height. The Khalif’s speaking-box. Designed so that Abassen’s ruler could hold court without enduring the profane gazes of his subjects. And within sat the Defender of Virtue.