Raseed was impressed to see a look of calm enemy-assessment rather than fear on her face.
“That one has ways of learning things,” the Doctor said, and his expression was as close to fear as Raseed had ever seen. “Ways that no man who values his soul can even fathom. The Traitorous Angel grants powers that God will not. He demands the sort of thing he has always demanded. Fear. The entrails of innocent old women. Pain. The eyelids of children. No books or clumsy rumors for the servants of the Traitorous Angel.”
Dawoud spoke with a hollow voice. “Orshado. When I touched that blood… I swear that none of you know the depths of the cruelty we face. With this one in command of such magics, the whole world will drown in blood within a week.”
“Six days thine to make man’s world, six days mine to unmake it,” Raseed recited. “The Traitorous Angel’s taunt to God upon his expulsion.” He had always hoped to be part of a battle that mattered this much. But he found now, to his shame, that he wished otherwise.
“We must stop him, then,” Litaz said matter of factly. “For reasons heavenly and earthly both. The new Khalif is a fool and a murderer, but his son… it was the boy’s idea to build those new poorhouses last year on the other side of Archer’s Yard. To put a hospice house there for the street people. Small gestures but more than his father makes. It is said he is a sweet-tempered boy, full of love for the common folk.”
The Doctor snorted “Give him another decade of life in the palace, and that will change! I can’t claim to be pleased with the notion of rushing to rescue the Khalif or his little shit of a son.”
Litaz rolled her eyes. “We don’t do this for their sakes, Adoulla. You know that. But we have little choice here.”
Dawoud lifted his teacup and drained its dregs. “So we go to the palace,” the magus said, “though we’ll not have an easy time getting an audience, no matter how many wild-eyed warnings we bring. Especially after my last visit. We’ll be lucky not to be taken for assassins ourselves. Roun Hedaad is a good man, but his guardsmen will be happy enough to fill us with crossbow bolts with little provocation. And even if we get past them, the Khalif will not see us.”
Adoulla wore a dark scowl as he spoke. “And what if the Khalif does listen? What if we somehow stop this Orshado? Then this foul power will be the Khalif’s to seize. Do any here truly doubt that he would slay his own son in order to do so?”
Raseed started to say that such a thing was not possible, but he knew the Doctor would mock him. And, as he thought on it, he was not sure that he could speak such words without uttering a falsehood.
For a long moment, none of the others answered the Doctor either. Then Dawoud stood. “It matters not. We can only do what we know we must do and leave the rest to the merciful hand of Almighty God.”
“Yes, it is all cut-and-dried,” the Doctor said sarcastically. “We need only defeat the most powerful ghul-maker we’ve ever faced. And somehow slay his unkillable creature while we’re at it.”
“The monster Mouw Awa is not unkillable, Doctor,” Zamia said, her voice half growl. “God willing, I will be the one to prove this.” Raseed’s heart beat faster, hearing such brave words.
The Doctor stroked his beard. “Aye, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, may it please God to make it so. It has been only few days since the creature left you lying on a litter, all but dead. Your healing, praise God, goes miraculously well. Do you think—” the Doctor’s voice grew as gentle as Raseed had ever heard “—do you think you can take the lion-shape again?”
Tears filled Zamia’s emerald eyes, but they did not fall. Raseed felt sick with knowing that he wanted—wickedly!—to go to her and to hold her as he had sometimes seen men hold women on Dhamsawaat’s streets.
A rueful scowl spread across Zamia’s face. “I don’t know, Doctor. Each month for several days, when I am—when women’s business is upon me—I am unable to take the shape. Yesterday was the last of those days. Even were I unwounded I would not be able to take the shape until the sun is at its highest point today. Come noon, though, I will try. If, may Almighty God forbid it, I fail, I will at least die trying.”
Raseed was incredulous—to make the tribeswoman speak of such shameful things, and then to ask this sacrifice of her! “Doctor, she was nearly killed the last time we faced this creature! We cannot ask her to—”
The girl’s growl was louder than any she’d made before. “No one is asking anything of me, Raseed bas Raseed. Things are as they are. I know the murderer of my band. Through my own carelessness he… it… escaped once. It will not happen again.”
The Doctor nodded. “Sometimes even a blind man can see the hand of God working. This thing Mouw Awa must be destroyed. Of that there can be no doubt. And God’s Angels have very clearly given us the proper weapon to do so. ‘To break down a wall when God grants a door is the work of fools.’ ”
Dawoud broke in, his words sounding hard and dry. “It is as it is, then. Zamia, you shall travel with us to the palace, and if we cross paths with this Mouw Awa, it falls to you to kill it.”
The old people went to prepare themselves, and Raseed found himself alone with Zamia. As soon as they were gone, she stepped close to him, and he fought furiously with himself to keep from breathing in her scent too deeply. When she spoke, he jumped, startled.
“Raseed bas Raseed,” she said quietly, “before we go to face our deaths, I would ask a question of you.”
“Yes?”
“Do you understand that, with my father dead, you must ask me directly if you wish for my hand in marriage?”
Raseed felt as if a sword had been slid into his guts. “I… I… Why would you ask…” he found he could not form words from his thoughts.
But the tribeswoman simply shrugged her slender shoulders. “The Heavenly Chapters tell us, O woman! Ask a hundred questions of your suitor and a hundred questions of yourself.”
“Suitor!?” Raseed had never before felt so lost within his own soul. Ten different men warred within him. “May God forgive me, Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, if I have behaved in a manner that… if I have shamed you by…”
“Shamed?” She looked baffled, which only confused him more. “How does shame come into this? I have simply seen the way you look at me. The only shame here would be born of deception. Can—?” she broke off at the sound of the Doctor’s heavy footsteps approaching from another room.
“If God grants us our lives beyond this day, we will speak of this again,” she said quickly. Then she nodded formally to him, ending the conversation.
Raseed went into his deep-breathing exercises, feeling more need for the calm they brought than he ever had. He stretched and prepared his mind and his body for battle, wondering whether he would die this day or live on with a soul full of shameful desires—and not knowing which would please God more.
III
The world was made of pain and the guardsman’s soul was formed from fear. How long had he sat unmoving in this cauldron, with only his head above the roiling red glow? He recalled, like dreams, slight sips of water and gruel. Some small, still-thinking part of him said that he was being kept alive while his body macerated slowly in the sparkling ruby oil.
The gaunt man in the filthy kaftan was there, holding open a sack of rich red silk. The shadow-jackal was beside him. The gaunt man upended the sack into the cauldron. Bones and skulls—men’s, but too small for men’s—spilled out with a ghastly clatter. Fragile looking skulls, tiny ribcages and fingerbones…