Beside Dawoud, Litaz sniffed. “Headknocker! Camelback! Such names you Quarter boys give yourselves!”
Dawoud squeezed her arm. This is not the time for your Niece-of-a-Pasha snoot, my love! he said with his eyes. But she ignored him.
“Really! Are these the names your mothers gave you?” She clucked her tongue.
The thugs took it in stride. Headknocker bowed half-jestingly. “If you really want to know, Auntie, my mother named me Fayyaz.”
“What do you know? Your mother named me ‘The Bedchamber Stallion!’,” one of Headknocker’s fellows broke in, snorting a laugh.
In spite of her snoot Litaz laughed, too. “O believer! When you meet a man on the road, know that God, who makes broken things whole, has cobbled your kindest fates together,” she recited, turning to the Prince. “I needed that laugh. May it please God to make us friends rather than enemies, Pharaad Az Hammaz.”
She’s still a spoiled Blue River girl at heart, Dawoud thought. Charmed by cold-blooded killers whom she thinks are loveable rogues. Not for the first time in his life, Dawoud felt a burning hatred of men with able bodies and too-quick smiles.
The Falcon Prince inclined his head in agreement with Litaz. “May it indeed be so, Auntie, but I will not bother to ask it of God, who has left man to fight and scramble over bits of food and land. Who lets flesh-burning diseases kill children!”
Raseed snarled, and it was as bestial as any growl from the tribeswoman.
“Be as angry as you like, dervish,” the Prince said. “God hasn’t given three shits for His children in six thousand years! Do you really believe that He sits in the sky, smiling upon us? Look around you! Look at this mad, bloody, muddy world of ours. He made the world, He made us, and then he left us to fend for ourselves. And so far, my friends, we’ve made it a pile of monkeyshit.” The bandit’s eyes lit again. “But even shit has its uses. Fertilizer. Fuel. Oh, yes. But to serve these purposes it must be ground to bits. Or burned.”
“Madman! Blasphemer!” Raseed took a long, threatening stride toward Az.
The bandit held up a hand to restrain his men and leveled a steely gaze at the dervish. “Watch yourself, young man. This is the real world, not a dueling circle. As you know, I fight dirty.”
The dervish’s hand darted to his swordhilt before he seemed to recall that he had no weapon.
Then Litaz jumped between them. My wife, the peacemaker, Dawoud thought. She drew herself up to her full height, which made her nearly as tall as Raseed but still left the top of her head well below the Prince’s shoulders.
“Are you two mad? Are you thoroughly mad? There are God alone knows how many lives at stake right now and you buffoons are thumping your chests at each other? We don’t have time for this! Idiots!”
Well, maybe not “peacemaker,” exactly.
The Prince smiled. “You remind me of my mother, Auntie. And my mother was not a kind woman. But I will stand down if your yapping little holy man will.”
“I will not allow blasphemy to pass unanswered,” the dervish said coldly.
Litaz wagged a finger in Raseed’s face, though her voice softened. “Answer me this, dear: Is this truly what you think God would have of us? Fighting one another over careless words while the world is carved into bloody pieces by the Traitorous Angel? We have precious little time. Are you serving the All-Merciful by wasting it here, shouting about how devout you are?”
Suddenly there was a series of frantic footfalls from the far tunnel. A man in the Falcon livery came trotting out, and the Prince went to confer with him. Then the master thief spoke to all assembled in the cave chamber. “The Soo woman is right, my friends—time is precious, and all is finally in readiness! Our time is at hand! We could have started a second civil war in this city years ago. But the Falcon knows when to strike and when not to. Have we screeched at the people about the injustice they face? No! We have stabbed fat jewelers in their asses and stolen their rubies for the poor! And now we stab the fattest jeweler of them all and toss the world’s greatest ruby to the crowd! Many of our friends have paid great costs to make this day possible. Will we let their sacrifices be wasted?”
“NO!” the master thief’s men shouted in unison.
“Our timing must be exact!” the Prince boomed. “We’ve but one chance to suddenly appear in the midst of the palace, weapons whirling, bold plans flying into glorious motion as—” The man was lost in his own storytelling, and the rest of his words were lost as he led the way out the far tunnel.
When they’d marched for a few minutes through another twisting tunnel, the Prince trotted back again to Dawoud and his friends. He spoke in low tones quite unlike his bombastic bluster of moments before.
“I can see the words ‘Where are we?’ etched on your faces,” he said. “I’ll tell you. We are in an underground passage to the palace. There are several such tunnels, some even the Khalifs never learned of. Older than the Khalifate itself, dating back to the days of the Kemeti Underground City. Known only to one who’s spent half a lifetime learning this lore. One tunnel in particular leads directly to the ruined Kem temple that the heart of the Palace was built upon. Unfortunately, the tunnel follows a rather circuitous route, snaking back and forth until ten minutes’ walk becomes an hour’s. Sound carries in here, so from here forward silence is required of us. And I don’t like to threaten newfound friends, but I must warn you that silence will be enforced if necessary. Oh, and I’d nearly forgotten—you may have your weapons back.” The master thief gestured to one of his men, who handed back Raseed’s sword and Litaz’s dagger, then he scampered back to the front of the line.
They walked for an hour, back and forth, upslope and downslope, through tunnels and rooms of pale stone and packed earth. As they walked, Dawoud’s feet ached and a thousand grim thoughts filled his head. But not a word escaped his lips.
Chapter 18
Nearly an hour after Adoulla and his friends were hushed by the Falcon Prince, the tunnel sloped sharply upward, steep enough that Adoulla found himself breathing heavily. The tunnel then opened into a massive… cave? Room? Whether the space itself was made by man or nature, the great stone-walled expanse about him was dank, a series of huge pools intersected by thin walkways and tall columns of shaped stone. Water gurgled all around him, and he had to keep himself from cursing aloud from the shock of what he was looking at. A cistern! Older than the Crescent Moon Palace and sitting smack dab beneath it! How long has it been since men walked down here?
He felt as if the city he knew were transforming beneath his feet. His head spun such that it took him a moment to process the fact that there were already men there when the party entered the cistern—it was their low, clean-burning torchlight he saw by.
Two muscular young men stood in the center of the great space, making adjustments to a long ladder-like contraption of poles and ropes. This ladder climbed to the ceiling, where it was almost lost to his old eyes. But as he stared up into the darkness, he made out a small hole in the ceiling which the ladder was somehow lashed to.
A well, Adoulla realized, a well that opens up within the palace. The city was shifting beneath his feet! The simple existence of that little hole of stone was astonishing—would the ages-ago civil war have gone differently, had the Holy Usurper’s forces known of this chink in the Khalifs’ armor? How might the last—?