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“WELCOME TO THE EAGLE’S NEST, EXCELLENCY. I TRUST YOUR RIDE across the mountains was not too arduous, and that your treasure remains undisturbed.”
The Black Khan stirred from his perusal of a message delivered to him by hawk. His sister, Darya, had sent news of events at Ashfall, along with her wishes for his safe return. He read loneliness in her words, her genuine affection for him—an affection he used against her without the slightest remorse. To do so did not trouble his conscience: such was his right as Khan. More than that, it was his duty as Prince of the Khorasan empire. He’d risked the dangerous ride from Black Aura to the Eagle’s Nest in order to fulfill that duty. Darya’s desire to see him again was the least of his concerns.
The man who now addressed him remained a mystery to Rukh. He was dressed in a shapeless brown robe belted at the waist, with a hood that covered most of his face. A lantern burning in the limestone chamber illuminated his jaw and the bleak white line of his smile. He was known simply as the Assassin, and he might have been thirty or sixty. Rukh had never seen the Assassin without his hood.
He’d yielded the throne in the chamber to the Black Khan as soon as Rukh had arrived. The Assassin wasn’t one for the accoutrements of power; in this way, as in so many others, he was markedly different from the Khan—a difference that Rukh had never bothered to examine. It was enough that the Assassin was his, as loyal in his own way as Arsalan, the commander of the Black Khan’s army. He stowed the scroll inside the medallion at his collar, giving the man his attention without rising from his chair. It was for the Assassin to make an obeisance.
The man in the robe didn’t hesitate. He bowed low, hovering over the Black Khan’s onyx ring without kissing it. “Excellency,” he said again, “my fortress is yours.”
The Black Khan’s men advanced a step to either side of the throne. The commander of his army always rode at his side, and now he moved closer to the Assassin, who backed away from him, a smooth smile edging his lips.
“Hasbah,” Rukh greeted him. “Does the Eagle’s Nest stand ready to aid me at this hour?”
The Assassin nodded. In all his transactions with Rukh, he’d made only one request in return: that the Black Khan should never attempt to determine his true identity. The name he permitted the Khan to use in the presence of others was a cipher, giving nothing away of his origins. It was a reasonable price to pay for the skills of a man who would execute on command any of the Black Khan’s enemies.
The Assassin beckoned Rukh to a window that overlooked the valley below. Both men ignored the boy trussed up and gagged at the foot of the Black Khan’s seat. He whimpered behind his gag. The Black Khan nudged him aside with his leather boot.
“What do you see, Excellency?”
Rukh studied the valley in the moonlight that washed the glade. The Assassin had made some improvements. The climb to the top of the mountain formed a natural barricade against invaders, but Hasbah had taken steps to camouflage his position. The stone quarried up the path was the same smooth limestone of the fortress, indistinguishable from the landscape below.
Rukh strolled to another of the chamber’s windows, this one facing the river behind the fortress, a second natural barrier. Hasbah had terraced the fertile plains below, growing and storing his own crops to prepare the fortress against a siege. The storerooms that wound down into the mountain’s subterranean channels could have rivaled those of the capital at Ashfall.
“The Eagle’s Nest is an impressive fiefdom. Do you govern the north from here?”
The Assassin’s answering smile was bland, as if to say there were no borders that could contain him. “Up to a point,” he said.
“As long as you remember that you do not command the West.”
The Assassin raised two gloved hands in protest. The arms of his robe fell back, the strange black gloves that rose to his elbows fastened by the silvery laces of a fabric that seemed too insubstantial to hold them together. The laces were another of the Assassin’s peculiarities.
“Command does not interest me,” Hasbah answered.
“But power does.”
Hasbah nodded. “The power of words.”
One of the Assassin’s servants held up a lantern and swept its light around the chamber. Rows of shelves had been carved into the limestone walls, each holding a selection of manuscripts inside a film of the same insubstantial fabric that laced the Assassin’s gloves.
The uppermost shelf held a new treasure bound with the same gossamer material. There was a note of anticipation in the Assassin’s voice. “Twice now I have brought it to you.”
“Your trap was well laid,” the Black Khan agreed. “It was boldly done.”
The Assassin preened at the Black Khan’s praise. “I could have rid you of the First Oralist once the deed was accomplished.”
At his words, the trussed-up boy whimpered.
“Be silent, boy,” Rukh said, not unkindly. “I haven’t harmed a hair of her head.” He shook his head at Hasbah. “She’s more powerful than you suspect, old friend.” He gave an elegant shrug. “And I’ve no wish to attract the wrath of one such as the Silver Mage.”
The Assassin’s posture conveyed his surprise. “I could have dispatched him as well, Excellency.” A note of doubt crept into his voice. “You are the Dark Mage. The Mages are natural allies, your magics are closely bound.”
A reasonable interpretation of folklore, though not necessarily true at present.
What was true was that the Assassin knew too much about his affairs. Rukh suspected him of intelligence-gathering. The Assassin must have missed, though, that when the Conference of the Mages had last been held at Ashfall, it was Rukh’s half-brother Darius who’d acted as the Dark Mage. It was a birthright the brothers shared, though Rukh himself had had no luxury to study or awaken those powers. Nor would he humble himself before the other Mages. He’d attempted a rapprochement with the High Companion of Hira—Ilea, the Golden Mage. But she’d met those advances with scorn. He wouldn’t belittle himself again. Now that he had the Bloodprint in his hands, the others would bow to him. A small smile curled the edges of his lips: how little they knew of his schemes.
What he needed was to make his way to Ashfall. With that in mind, he’d come to the Eagle’s Nest to seek the help of the Assassin. The Talisman had cut off the road to his capital, under the thrall of the One-Eyed Preacher, whose animus against the written word had become the law of the land: an ignorance the Talisman sought to extend across Khorasan, under their bloodstained flag. The Talisman were marching on his capital to burn his scriptorium down. They would take the women of his city and sell them to the north as slaves. Unless he found a weapon to wield against them—and he fiercely believed that the Bloodprint was that means.
Now with the Bloodprint under his protection, he needed a safe route home. He also needed men—men who would relish taking the heads of those Talisman commanders who sought to bring his city to ruin.
The Assassin had those men in legions.
Hasbah snapped his fingers. Servants scurried to do his bidding. A carved table was brought into the chamber, numerous dishes arranged on its surface. Sherbet was poured into golden goblets. The Assassin himself placed a chair for the Black Khan at the head of the table.
Rukh nodded at the boy. One of the servants moved to undo the boy’s gag. The Black Khan passed him a goblet and a plate. “Your name is Wafa, yes? Prove your loyalty, then. You will dine, then I and my men.” His eyes sought out the Assassin beneath his hooded robe. “And when the boy has tasted my food, you will tell me what you seek in exchange, old friend. Currency, coin, or women? Whatever you ask shall be given, but I must reach Ashfall before the Talisman assault.”
Hasbah took the chair opposite the Black Khan. He steepled his gloved fingers, watching the boy eat with a ravenous hunger, oblivious to the fact he was tasting the food for poison.
“My needs are simple, Excellency. While you provision your men for the journey ahead, I require a candle’s length of time to read in this room on my own.”
Wafa stopped chewing, his mouth half-open, his amazement clear that here was another who could read.
The Black Khan signaled for the return of his goblet. He tipped it toward the light to study the liquid inside. “And what will you be reading, old friend?” He asked this even though he knew the answer.
The Assassin wanted an hour with the Bloodprint.
“Excellency, if you honor my request, I would offer a gift in exchange.” The Assassin indicated another wall of the chamber. Its shelves were broader and held a selection of treasures displayed in open boxes: gemstones, talismans, astrolabes, sextants. A silver light pulsed from a slender box at the far end of the room.
“What does that box contain?”
“The tokens of the Silver Mage. I … liberated … them from his safehold in Maze Aura. Would you like to take them for your own?”
Rukh fingered the symbol of empire on his hand: the onyx ring carved with a silver rook. It was token enough for him: whatever his reputation, the Prince of Khorasan wasn’t a common thief, though it intrigued him that the Silver Mage had set aside the symbols of his rank. He remembered the other man’s self-contained strength with a scowl, admitting to himself that perhaps the Silver Mage had no need of his tokens at all.
“I have no use for the trifles of the Silver Mage, and I am satisfied with the bargain we have struck. Take your hour, Hasbah. Then I must hasten to Ashfall.”
He looked to Arsalan, his closest adviser, who stood behind Hasbah’s seat, his hand on the pommel of his sword. But Arsalan’s state of alertness was futile. If it came to it, even Rukh’s fiercest commander would not succeed at besting the Assassin.
No one ever had.
6 (#u110d2d8a-5131-57f2-8ba5-3a5159d504c3)
A NEST OF SNAKES MADE THEIR PRESENCE KNOWN IN HIS CELL, BUT THEY left the Silver Mage to bleed in peace in the dungeons of the Ark, a desperate place called the Pit. Its blood-smeared walls were riddled with alcoves the Authoritan had converted into cells. No light penetrated from the great hall above to the dungeons that sloped beneath the palace, but some of its passages accessed the air aboveground, an ever-present torment to the Basmachi suffering below. The agonizing sound of Arian’s screams had floated through the passageways during his first week in the Pit, and he had nearly gone mad—powerless to reach her, ablaze with an incandescent fury matched only by his abject desperation. His fingers had scored the walls of his cell, the unyielding muscles of his shoulders bruised by his efforts to break free. He’d gained nothing from those efforts except the terror that followed from hearing Arian’s cries fade away.
Had the Authoritan killed her? Had he given her to the Ahdath? What did she suffer alone in the darkest reaches of the Ark?
He needed to clear his mind to resolve upon a path of escape. But Arian’s anguish made it impossible to succeed. He found himself floundering without agency, bound by the borders of the Pit, his ability to endure worn away. Then after a week had passed, Arian’s screams had ceased—leaving him free to focus on the depravities of the Pit, with none of his torments assuaged.
The humid air carried the stench of boiling flesh to the deepest corners of the pit, a scent further corroded by the odors of waste and blood. Then in the last hour of a man’s strength, a hint of peach blossom would drift through the Pit’s passageways like a promise of salvation. Peach and pomegranate and hope—false promises all.
Daniyar grunted, shifting his body along the wall to the bars that looked out along the passage. A handful of Basmachi were held in the other cells. He’d managed to speak with them over the past few days, learning what he could of the Ark. An emaciated youth with hopeless eyes had been the one to tell him about the healing effects of the loess that coated the walls. He hadn’t believed the boy at first, but after his first lashing, he’d been willing to consider any means of healing his wounds. Each time he was bled by the whip, he rubbed his back against the golden loess. As he did so, his pain decreased and the marks of the whip ceased to throb. When Nevus slashed his palms with a blade, the loess healed his hands in a night.
“It’s the secret of Marakand,” the boy said. “It may be the only one the Authoritan doesn’t know.”
A blessing in a place of despair.
The boy’s name was Uktam, and he’d been imprisoned in the Pit much longer than the others. He was kept alive because he was useful to the Authoritan as an informant against the Basmachi. He’d seen many of his compatriots come and go from the cells, each cursing him as a traitor. Daniyar set his distaste at the boy’s actions aside, as he needed information. So he asked Uktam questions, but shared no intelligence of his own, warned by the others to watch himself when Uktam was summoned to the palace. Not that he needed a warning—the proof of Uktam’s betrayal could be seen on his body. The boy may have been beaten and starved, but his back had been spared the whip.
Daniyar groaned to himself. The loess was less effective with each new flogging he suffered. Night after night, Nevus escorted him to the throne room for a display of the Authoritan’s sadism. It was Nevus who whipped him, a cold satisfaction in his eyes, and Nevus’s arm was powerful. The six-tailed whip was unlike anything Daniyar had experienced. Its filaments seemed to strike his most vulnerable places at once. The tails of the whip were barbed. They scored his skin with dozens of agonizing bites, mocking the strength and endurance he had honed since he’d come to manhood.
Perhaps worse than the whip was his degradation—his punishment had become an entertainment for the court. Ahdath bartered with Nevus to take a turn with the whip. On occasion, pretty young girls from among the Khanum’s doves would plead for a chance to bend him to their will.
Their blows didn’t land with enough force to hurt him. They couldn’t compare to the memory of his first night at the Ark, when the Authoritan had taken the whip into his hands, strengthened by an unholy magic.
Daniyar had tried to summon his knowledge of the Claim to meet the Authoritan’s brutality, until Arian’s screams had shattered the Ahdath’s merriment, and their attention had shifted from him. In that moment, his will had foundered. Chained to the wall, he hadn’t been able to see her. But he’d heard the sounds of Arian being subdued. She had fought the Ahdath like a wild thing, and when she could fight no longer, she had screamed for his deliverance, begging the Authoritan with a furious desperation, pleading with the Khanum to put an end to his torment.
Daniyar hadn’t been able to master himself. He’d shouted at the force of the blows, at the insidious incursions of the whip’s barbed tails. The whip had been devised to inflict maximum damage. At the end of it, he’d hung suspended from his chains, unable to support his own weight, his face wet with sweat and tears, the muscles of his back sectioned by trails of blood.
And with every breath he had summoned, he’d heard Arian’s broken pleading. “Leave him, leave him, take me.”
Better not to have betrayed their feeling for each other before the eyes of the Authoritan, but he couldn’t have done anything differently. If the whip had fallen on Arian instead, he would have gone mad with rage.
Gathering himself, he had turned his head to try to glimpse her. His token effort had failed. He’d offered her what comfort he could, speaking in the dialect of Candour, an undertone of the Claim murmuring through his words. “Da zerra sara, I can bear this, but I need you to be strong. I cannot also bear your tears.”
“Jaan,” she had whispered in reply. It was all she’d been able to say. He’d heard the sounds of her struggle, but he couldn’t see the collar being fitted over her throat, suffocating Arian in the cruelest manner possible—the First Oralist, silenced and chained.
Then he’d felt the cool touch of a woman’s hand on his shoulder, her nails trailing through his blood, spreading it across his back in a pattern he couldn’t see. “Collect it,” she said to a servant at her side.
A vial was placed at the base of his spine, its warmth nearly intolerable against his ravaged skin. The Khanum was collecting his blood.
Briefly he closed his eyes.
She moved closer so he could see her, her lead mask reeking of poison. She dragged her bloodied fingers across her lips, staining her white mask red. “You taste better than I imagined.” Then she kissed him on the lips.
What can you tell me of the First Oralist of Hira?” He used the bars of the cell to support his weight, asking the question of Uktam, who was slumped against a wall of his cell.
Uktam’s head lolled in Daniyar’s direction, his eyes bulging from within his hollow skull. He raised a hand and let it fall. “The Khanum keeps her at her side. The collar prevents her use of the Claim. The Khanum has enchanted it somehow.”
Daniyar nodded. Though Uktam told him the same thing every night, he had yet to comprehend the full extent of Lania’s powers.
“She hasn’t been put to the service of the Ahdath?”
The possibility filled him with terror. The Authoritan threatened him with it each time Nevus whipped him, but he hadn’t seen Arian since that first night in the throne room. And Lania had refused to enlighten him, relishing the power of her silence.
He was devastated by the thought of Arian being given to the Ahdath: as the man who’d loved her for a decade, and as the Silver Mage of Candour. The violation of a Companion of Hira was a sacrilege, but he’d learned a critical lesson from the threat: no laws of honor bound either the Authoritan or his consort.
Yet Lania was Arian’s sister. Could she truly bring herself to give Arian to the Ahdath? Without her use of the Claim, Arian was defenseless against them. With the power of speech restored to her, he knew she would bring down the Ark, just as she’d razed the Registan.
No wonder the Authoritan feared her power. No wonder he sought to claim it for himself.
He focused on his questions for Uktam. “Why don’t they take the First Oralist to the throne room?”
Uktam was too weak to shrug. With an effort underscored by the Claim, Daniyar slid his bowl across the passage between the cells. Two of the yellow snakes raised their sleek heads with interest. Daniyar murmured to them; they lowered their heads again.
“Take it,” he said to Uktam. “You need it more than I do.”
Uktam’s fingers scrabbled weakly between the bars. He found the bowl and scooped up the rice it contained. Daniyar let him finish, then asked his question again. Uktam licked the bowl clean before he answered. “I shouldn’t have taken your ration.”
“You’re at the end of your strength.” Daniyar didn’t add that he held something of his own in reserve, despite his nightly sessions in the throne room. Since the Talisman’s ascent, he’d lived a hard, demanding life. He’d spent years honing his skills, testing the reserves of his strength against a desolate landscape. Though his trials at the Ark were brutal, he was confident he would be able to endure them. But if Uktam was an informant, it was wiser to keep this knowledge to himself. “Please,” he said again. “Tell me what you know.”
Uktam considered. “The Khanum is jealous of her sister. She does not wish the Companion of Hira recalled to your mind when she is present.”
“There is nothing they could do with the whip that would cause me to forget her.” That much was common knowledge.
Uktam nodded. “She is well aware. But she has some purpose for your blood.”
“Do you know what that purpose is?”
Uktam stared at the empty bowl as if it were an oracle that could divine the truth.
“Don’t trust him,” another voice whispered from the darkness. “He tells you that which the Khanum wishes you to know.”
Uktam scowled. “I would not betray the Silver Mage,” he said with dignity.
The other prisoner snorted. “You’ve betrayed each one of us in these cells. You’ve been kept alive these months for a reason.”
“And what of you?” Daniyar intervened. “You’ve been here some time yourself.” He needed Uktam on his side.
“A day before you, my lord. Tomorrow they execute me, but this one will still be here.”
Uktam slid the bowl back across the passage to the Silver Mage. His head fell back against the bars. “Even if I lied to you, I follow the Usul Jade. I’m a student of the teachings of Mudjadid Salikh. He trained many generations in the Claim—which is why the Authoritan destroyed him. But what he could not destroy was the flame of knowledge he lit, and now his daughters carry that light forward. With what I owe Mudjadid—my sanity, my life, my unsundered belief in the Claim—I would never betray the First Oralist.”
Daniyar read the truth of it in his words. He hadn’t told these men of his skills as Authenticate; he wanted them to speak to him freely.
And he wondered about Salikh, whose daughters Larisa and Elena had helped Arian to find the tomb that had led her to the safehold of the Bloodprint. Would Larisa and Elena Salikh be willing to aid them again? He kept the thought to himself, the merest hope in his chest.
Uktam was speaking again, and he forced himself to consider the boy’s advice. “You could use the Khanum’s interest to your benefit,” he suggested. “She is taken with more than your blood. You need not endure the whip. I do not know how you bear it.”
Daniyar softened his voice. “You were kind enough to tell me of the loess; it has served to ease my pain. I am grateful to you, Uktam. If you know a course of action I might take, I am willing to hear it.”
“No, my lord!” The cry came from a prisoner Daniyar couldn’t see. “You cannot trust him. You must not trust him. He is the Khanum’s man.”
“Who better, then, to know the Khanum’s mind?” He turned his silver gaze on Uktam. “What does she want?”
This time Uktam managed a shrug. “She wants you, my lord. But you will need to prove yourself to her.”
“And how do you suggest I do that? With the Authoritan’s eyes on us both, and Nevus’s hunger for the whip yet to be fulfilled?”
And my bond with Arian plain for all the world to witness, as we suffer each other’s torments?
