Name of God, no!
The long-faced minister from the Khalif’s court came walking up surrounded by a retinue of a half-dozen guardsmen. What on God’s great earth is he doing here? “What do we have here?” he said. The gray-eyed officer started to explain, but the minster waved the young man back to the guardhouse. Then he turned to Dawoud.
“You were warned to stay away from the palace, old man. And instead you have returned with armed friends! You are either mad or the foulest of traitors.”
Dawoud knew better than to try and speak to this man of the threat that loomed over the throne. “A thousand apologies, your eminence. I am here only because I need to see Roun Hedaad.” He heard his friends shuffling nervously around him.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “The captain is busy. And you have disregarded most traitorously the express wishes of his Majesty. Your friendship with the captain does not change that. Men! Seize them!”
Dawoud heard Raseed mumble a prayer. The Badawi girl growled. Dawoud looked a question at his wife and Adoulla in the wordless near-language that the three had developed over decades of fighting together. What do we do now?
But neither his wife nor Adoulla seemed to have any answers. And really, there was nothing they could do. Even if they were somehow able to kill a squad of guardsmen, more would show, and they would die before ever getting inside the palace. Their only hope was going along for now and waiting for an opportunity—or creating an opportunity—to get word to Roun Hedaad. And to hope that he could actually do something to help them. The guardsmen took his wife’s knife and Raseed’s sword, and marched them at spearpoint away from the gate.
Dawoud cursed the slow roll of this own thoughts and saw his frustration reflected in his wife’s and Adoulla’s eyes. There was a way out of this—the three of them had destroyed the Kemeti Golden Serpent and bested a whole band of invisible robbers. These were just men with weapons. They had only to puzzle out…
His train of thought broke as he realized the minister and his men were leading them away from the palace. This can’t be good. After a few minutes they were well away from the gates, in a secluded alley of the Palace Quarter. They came to a small, windowless house with a barred iron door. The minister opened this door himself with a set of three small keys. Once they were inside, the guardsmen closed the door behind them.
Adoulla was the first to finally find his tongue. “Why on God’s great earth have you brought us here?”
A big guardsman casually shoved the ghul hunter with his spear-butt and told him to shut up. The minister, still not saying a word to them, went to the center of the house’s one room and lifted up a dusty old rug. Beneath the rug was a metal grille, which the minister opened with yet another key. Though it was rusty, the grille made no noise when the minister swung it up. There was a stairway—wide enough for two men—carved into the stone floor beneath the grille, leading down to God-alone-knew-where. Some dank hole where we can be slain without the Captain of the Guard knowing about it, no doubt.
“No more of this!” Zamia shouted suddenly, her thoughts clearly going down the same road. She drew herself up fiercely and, Dawoud noticed, tried to hide the pain still in her side. “I can smell the deceit on you! A Banu Laith Badawi is not marched into murder quietly like some docile townsman!”
“I said, be QUIET!” the same guardsmen who’d jabbed Adoulla said, accentuating the last word with a much crueler jab of his spear into the small of the tribeswoman’s back. Zamia cried out and buckled but did not fall.
Dawoud didn’t even see Raseed move. But the next thing he knew the little dervish was, with one hand, holding the big guardsman aloft by the throat. If Dawoud had ever doubted Adoulla’s tales of the boy’s more-than-human prowess, he couldn’t doubt them now!
There was a sudden clatter of weapons, and another group of armed men came pouring out of the hole in the floor like ants from an anthill. They and the guardsmen formed a circle around Dawoud and his friends.
The new men were armed with daggers and cudgels. They wore the simple clothes of laborers or apprentices, though here and there Dawoud saw a bit of incongruous ornament: a silk scarf around the neck of the lanky man in front of him, an embroidered vest on a short but hard-looking boy to his right. At equidistant points of the circle of plainly dressed toughs were figures wearing some sort of livery. One of these was an ugly woman, tall and stout as a man. They were dressed identically, in tight-fitting linen breeches and thigh length overshirts the color of wet sand. The image of a swooping black falcon was dyed across the front of each shirt. These were better armed than the others. Each held a well-made cutlass and wore a small buckler made of steel-reed.
A bombastic voice boomed forth from the new group. “Leave the man be, Master Dervish! He has brought you here to speak with me, so let us start speaking!”
Pharaad Az Hammaz, the Falcon Prince, stepped into the center of the room. He moved like liquid in a man’s shape, though he was well over six feet tall and had the thick, sinewy arms of a blacksmith. His hand was on the black-and-gold handguard of his saber. Raseed let go of the big guard who had struck Zamia and the man collapsed, clutching his neck and desperately sucking in breath.
Dawoud found himself fumbling for his thoughts like a boy playing Beat the Blind Man. “You… you…” he turned to the long-faced minister, “you work for him?”
The minister scowled and said nothing, but the Prince sketched a half-bow to Dawoud and his friends. He put one of his massive hands on Adoulla’s shoulder. “What are the chances, Uncle, that we should meet again like this?” the bandit asked. “That, in surveying the crooked gatekeepers of the palace, my men should see your bright white kaftan cutting through the crowd? And with such a strange assortment of friends about you? ‘Az,’ I said to myself, ‘What are the chances? There must be something to this. Let’s have a talk with the Doctor and find out what that something is.’ ”
One of the men wearing the falcon livery—a burly fellow with only one ear—spoke up. “Aye, sire, there be little enough chance of it. Little enough chance that it’s a-makin’ me suspicious. Something here be smelling of the Khalif’s shitty finger, and this ain’t a day for surprises. All of your work, sire, for all of them years, leadin’ to today. They’ve already harmed one of ours.” He gestured at the still half-choking guardsman. “Ask me, the only safe thing now would be to kill ’em.” The matter-of-factness in the man’s voice chilled Dawoud.
For a long, moustache-stroking moment, the Falcon Prince seemed to consider his lieutenant’s suggestion. But the Prince’s brown face split in a broad smile as he spoke. “No. No, Headknocker, that would be a dreadfully poor repayment to the Doctor here, who, mere days ago, nobly misdirected the watch to save my hide. And it would be a rotten foundation for our new order. Besides, this man earned his own throttling. Striking an unarmed girl like that!” The Prince tsk-tsked at the big guardsman even as he helped the man to his feet.
Misdirected? What is he talking about? Dawoud wondered. He could not imagine his old friend had become an agent of the Falcon Prince without his knowing it. And though he’d half expect Adoulla’s assistant to leap at the chance to confront the most wanted criminal in the city, the boy was strangely still—as if paralyzed by some internal anguish.
“I’m afraid, however,” the Prince continued, “that you are all my prisoners. And if you are agents of the new Khalif, that no-good son of a half-good man, I must warn you: I am not foolish enough to underestimate you. Even you, girl,” he said, turning to Zamia and eyeing her rudely from head to toe, “are perhaps more than you seem, eh?” The Prince turned back to Adoulla. “So why are you here?”