The Black Khan

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  “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

  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?

  “The Authoritan enjoys your pain. You must find a way to turn that to your advantage. You must divide the Khanum from her consort. Then she will rally to your cause.”

  My cause is Arian. It will always be Arian.

  But if there was a path to Arian through Lania—if Lania could be seduced, if her message to him through Uktam was that she would welcome proof of her powers of enthrallment—he would be a fool not to pursue it when here at last was a chance. A chance to break free of the Pit, and also to discover the reason that Lania hunted his blood.

  “What must I do? Speak plainly.”

  Uktam’s head lolled on his shoulders. As the boy dropped his tired eyes, Daniyar heard the truth in his voice. Uktam did not deceive him. “You must fight for her,” he said. “You must fight the Ahdath.”

  7

  “COME WATCH ME, SISTER.” THE KHANUM OF BLACK AURA SEATED HERSELF on a golden stool whose seat was inlaid with pearls. It was placed in front of a pearl-encrusted mirror before a table that held an apothecary’s treasure in colored jars, a mixture of paints and ointments and dozens of sweet-smelling oils. Filmy curtains stirred in the breeze from a pair of windows that looked out over Black Aura. Sentries patrolled the ramparts in the distance, but this side of the Ark was spared the grisly remains of prisoners or the stench that hung over the square.

  Layers of blues shadowed an evening sky that blossomed with clusters of stars. Now that the Authoritan had finished for the day with Arian, a fragile peace existed between the sisters.

  ‘Black Aura Blue,’” Lania said with a smile. “The name of a song my doves sing to the Ahdath in the evenings, a song of our twilight skies.”

  Arian knelt on the ground beside her sister. When they were alone together like this, Lania removed her collar. She had no need to fear Arian’s use of the Claim: Daniyar’s life was bought with her compliance. Then too, Lania was gifted with her own magic, a dark sorcery she conjured to keep Arian in her place.

  Now Arian pondered the opposite fates of the daughters of their house, daughters who were gifted in the Claim. They had been taught by parents who cherished the written word, linguists who had curated their own small scriptorium, guarding a treasury of manuscripts. When the Talisman had come to their door to proclaim the law of the Assimilate, her parents and brother had been murdered, and Lania stolen away. Only Arian had been saved by her mother’s quick action and by her deliverance into the hands of a Talisman captain named Turan. Turan had come to her aid again during her pursuit of the Bloodprint. And he had paid the price for riding at her side, when Lania—with her powers as the Khanum—might have chosen to save him.

  But short of the darkest sorcery, Lania could not revive the dead. If Arian’s struggles with the Claim had taught her nothing else, this much she’d witnessed for herself. And she wondered with a pang of dread how Lania’s distortion of the Claim had caused her sister to lose her way.

  Now Lania sat before her mirror, shorn of her intricate headdress, her silky hair brushed over her shoulders, her face bare of the wraithlike mask. Her slender fingers picked up a brush. She dipped it in a pot of lead inscribed with thick-lined calligraphy. It was charmed with incantations that promised power and protection. She settled in to paint her face.

  “Why?” Arian asked. “Why do you we
ar this mask? Your face is beautiful unadorned.”

  “You compliment yourself, sister,” Lania said coolly. “The mask is my shield. It warns my enemies to be wary of my power.”

  They studied each other in the mirror. They shared the same felicitous arrangement of their bones, the same delicate hollows at the temple, the same quick mannerisms captured by a tilt of the head. Lania’s green eyes were flecked with spears of gold; Arian’s were darker and deeper. And where Lania’s pale skin had been unnaturally preserved by the mask, Arian’s bore the glow of frequent exposure to the elements. They looked of an age, but on closer inspection, one would never be taken for the other. And from the grim twist of Lania’s bare lips, she wasn’t pleased by the contrast.

  Whereas Arian’s heart ached to find the mirror of her sister in herself.

  She tried to urge Lania again, seeking a point of connection. “Come with me, Lania. Escape this place with me. Help me save you. Help me save myself.”

  She’d made the same plea each night, seeking a means to return to her companions, desperate for deliverance from the misery of the Ark, wanting to find herself clasped in the safety of Daniyar’s arms. And to embrace him in turn, cleaving hard to his strength. She knew that she had squandered the time she’d been blessed to be given at his side, a lesson too painful to bear. She took an audible breath, reminding Lania that she waited for an answer to her plea.

  With one last stroke of her brush, Lania’s mask was in place. The illusion of familiarity vanished: a stranger’s face looked back at Arian, remote and formidable with secrets.

  “What do you imagine I need saving from?” Lania asked idly. “I am queen of an empire. Why would I seek deliverance?”