His thoughts were interrupted as the Prince turned to them and raised a finger to his lips, again demanding silence. The Prince strode forward and, using a series of hand signals Adoulla could not begin to follow in the half-dark, consulted with the two men at the ladder. A moment later, the bandit gestured for the group to gather around the ladder. A few of his men were already climbing it.
The Prince gestured for Adoulla and his friends to climb. Adoulla heard Dawoud curse softly beside him. But as the magus climbed, he seemed to have an easier time than he’d expected. As Adoulla began to climb he could feel why—there was something ingenious about the ladder’s construction that made moving up it less arduous than it ought to have been. As the well-hole above him slowly drew closer, Adoulla sensed more than heard another group of the Prince’s men enter the cistern below him and head for the ladder. Of course. The Prince had had some special climbing-device rigged here because he intended for a good number of armed men to quickly make their way up it and into the palace.
Adoulla’s palms burned a bit from gripping rope, and he was sweating beneath his kaftan. A few feet above him he heard Dawoud breathing hard. Ingenious device or no, he was thankful when they finally reached the top, climbed out of the well-hole…
And emerged right in the midst of a knot of tense-looking guardsmen brandishing weapons. Adoulla nearly dropped back down the rope-and-pole ladder in fear. Then he saw that these men were exchanging hand signals with those of the Prince’s men who had climbed up before him. More infiltrators. He didn’t know if he was pleased or disturbed by how pervasive the Prince’s influence seemed to be within the palace.
The room they’d reached was two dozen feet on a side and made of gray stone. It smelled of the well water below. The Prince gestured Adoulla and his friends over to a small, arched doorway in the far wall. Dervish and magus, alkhemist and Badawi gathered around the Prince, as did a half-dozen of his men. Glancing behind them, Adoulla saw that the room was already filling with armed men, a steady stream of whom were quietly making their way out of the well.
The Prince led them through the doorway into a huge kitchen filled with low stone ovens. Two other doorways led from the kitchen to other rooms, and each of these was flanked by two guardsmen. Their lack of alarm at the Prince’s entrance meant that they, too, were his agents. The smell of baking bread filled the room, but beneath it was another scent that Adoulla knew—blood.
In the center of the kitchen stood a massive dark brown woman, as big as Adoulla, wearing a cook’s apron and holding a big, bloody cleaver. A dead guardsman lay slumped at her feet, his head opened by a nasty gash. The Prince dashed to the woman and exchanged a few quick hand signals. Then, with that more-than-human speed, he ran in a circle about the kitchen, sprinkling some sort of powder on the ground until it surrounded the whole room. He produced a flintbox, and lit the powder, which didn’t burn with a visible flame, but surrounded them with a low blue glow. Alkhemy, Adoulla knew, but he knew little more than that. He looked a question at Litaz, but she only shrugged. It was a rare compound indeed that could baffle her. For what felt like the hundredth time that day, he was impressed by the Prince’s resources.
“Well!” Pharaad Az Hammaz boomed, breaking the silence. “We can speak now, and the powder of the panthers will keep our words from being heard outside this room. My friends, meet Mother Midnight, Queen of the Khalif’s Kitchens. For years now, she and the minister you met earlier have been helping me arrange this little festival of ours. If we survive this day, we will owe it all to her.” The Prince turned to the big woman. “I presume, from the lack of shouts and bell-ringing, that we remain undetected?”
“Aye, Pharaad,” Mother Midnight said, her voice sounding like a rockslide. “The few fools who stuck their noses in the wrong place at the wrong time have been dealt with, but we won’t be able to keep these bodies hidden forever.” She gestured with her crimson-stained cleaver to the dozen great ovens that dominated the room. Here and there, sticking out of the ovens, Adoulla saw a man’s hand or booted foot.
He felt sick. The dice have fallen from the cup, then. We are a part of this mad usurpation whether or not we wish to be.
Beside him, Raseed and Zamia started to speak outraged words, but he turned to them with his hardest glare. “Orshado. Mouw Awa,” he whispered harshly. “There is no other way to stop them now. That matters more than anything.” Praise God, neither warrior-child said anything more.
“He’s two rooms down, Pharaad. In the Velvet Chamber, about to take his private Thirdday Noonmeal. The Defender of Virtue is never truly alone, but this is the closest he gets to it all week. Everything is as you planned—this is the moment we’ve waited for.”
Raseed broke his brief silence. “And do you feel no shame, woman? No shame at all in betraying your Khalif and master in this way?”
The Falcon Prince turned an angry eye on the boy, and Mother Midnight scowled and sucked her teeth. “Ask the Defender of Virtue about my daughter and his… appetites, holy man. Ask him about Mother Midnight, who loyally served him and his father before him, and was repaid with the rape and rejection of an only child who killed herself. Then speak to me of shame and betrayal.”
To Adoulla’s surprise, that shut the boy up. Behind them, more of the Prince’s men filed quietly into the kitchen.
The Falcon Prince put a big hand on Mother Midnight’s shoulder. “Auntie, I swear by my soul that in half a day’s time you’ll be able to ask the sack of scum yourself. Though I fear the only answer you’ll get will be the sound of his head hitting the executioner’s leather mat!”
He turned to Adoulla. “I don’t see that there are any monsters here, save the one I’ve come a-hunting, Uncle. But two rooms from this one lies the man who is strangling our city. I give you and yours one more chance to choose. Follow me into that room and live with the consequences, or go back down that well—under my men’s guard, of course—and sit this adventure out, despite your wild warnings of ghuls. Either way, the dervish’s words make me wary. I will have your oaths before God that you will not betray me,” he said, looking pointedly at Raseed, “or you will go no further with us.”
The heretic who asks for oaths, Adoulla thought bitterly, and saw his wry expression reflected on his friends’ faces as they each said “I swear it before Almighty God.” All except Raseed, whose face may as well have been carved from marble for all that it revealed. He knows, as I do, that this Orshado will show himself, and that it is his holy duty to help me stop such a man. And no doubt another part of him wishes to watch over the tribeswoman.
The boy said nothing. Adoulla cleared his throat. Mother Midnight, who’d been busy stuffing the guardsman’s split-skulled corpse into an oven, tapped her foot and said, “We haven’t time for this, Pharaad.”
Adoulla gripped the dervish’s elbow and squeezed. He saw Raseed’s gaze dart once in Zamia’s direction before the boy whispered, “I swear it before Almighty God.”
Following the master thief, they moved from the kitchen into a room with intricately engraved white walls. The light scent of pleasant perfumes—more subtle than incense and no doubt disbursed by wafting-spells—filled the space. An ebonwood door in the opposite wall was the only dark mark in the room. Before Adoulla could begin to think about what a monumental moment he was partaking in, the Prince and a knot of his men had crossed the room and slit the throats of two guardsmen. The Prince kicked in the big doors with a seemingly impossible strength and flew into the far room. There was nothing Adoulla and his friends could do now but follow.