The Black Khan

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

“The gas was terrible,” Sinnia said. “And I was desperate for the needle—Larisa and Elena were right. But in that last encounter, when they left me alone on the table, Salikh used the Claim to reach me. I didn’t understand what he was doing at first—but from the moment he saw me at Jaslyk and realized who I was, he was whispering the Claim to me, opening up my ability to reach it and reclaim it for myself. His power was immense, augmented by the voices of his followers—or should I call them prayers? Whatever it was he did, each time I thought I would slip over the edge, his followers pulled me back. And then the moment came when I no longer needed their help. I wasn’t weak and besieged—I had powers I’d never had before.” She flexed her wrists, strapping her bow to her back. “I cannot say exactly what he did. I know only that it is Salikh’s choice to remain imprisoned at Jaslyk. His knowledge of the Claim runs deep and vast—he works his own purpose with it. May the One grant that it be of service to Elena and Larisa now …” She shook her head, experiencing the emotion that had flooded her senses in the cell—transformed for an instant by its brilliance. Then the incandescent memory slowly ebbed, and she nodded at Arian’s clothes on the bank, recalled to the present moment.

  With a quick smile and a return to her air of mischief, she teased Arian. “You should dress before the Silver Mage returns. Unless, judging from what I witnessed earlier, you would welcome him finding you like this.”

  Arian sputtered at the thought. She splashed a handful of water at Sinnia. And smiled when Sinnia laughed at her in response.

  33

  ELENA WOUND HER NECK SCARF AROUND HER HEAD SO ONLY HER NARROW blue eyes were visible. She led the way from one axis of Jaslyk’s diamond-shaped formation to another. The passage that linked them should have been guarded, but the Crimson Watch had been summoned to put down the chaos in the Technologist’s Wing.

  In his crimson armor with a gas mask covering his face, Illarion resembled them. Why wouldn’t he? He was one of them.

  “Grab a mask, Elena. You won’t survive the Plague Wing without it.

  “Then I die, Salikhate. I won’t wear one of their masks again. Do you have the key to the doors of the Plague Wing?”

  He held up an amulet in the shape of a pentagon, his face expressionless behind the gas mask. He tucked it behind his breastplate, a gesture Elena noted. If there came a moment when he proved to be leading her into a trap, she would know where to find it after she’d killed him.

  He’s one of mine, her father had said in the brief time they’d had together. Illarion is a brother to you.

  She had no brothers. And with Ruslan dead, she had no lover either. Whatever game this soldier of the Salikhate was playing, he would never lay hands on her—either as lover or enemy.

  Disproving the thought as soon as it passed through Elena’s mind, Illarion jerked her roughly behind him. “Fall back,” he muttered. “There’s a patrol ahead.”

  They found one of the doors along the passage unlocked and crouched behind it, waiting for the sound of the Ahdath’s boots to pass.

  “They’ll kill the prisoners we left behind. They’ll kill my father.”

  “No, they won’t. Trust me.”

  But she didn’t trust him—she never would.

  Illarion pulled her out of the room as soon as the Ahdath moved on. She yanked her hand away with a scowl he couldn’t see.

  “I don’t need your protection, Salikhate. I’m a leader of the resistance. You should follow me.”

  He said nothing. He simply gestured at her to lead on.

  They crept down one staircase and along another corridor where torches had been lit, avoiding the sweep of the minzar.

  “The minzar reaches this area every forty-five seconds. That’s how much time it takes to sweep the entire prison. Their protocols haven’t changed.”

  “How do you know this, Anya? Just how long were you held here?”

  Elena shifted her daggers into her hands. She ignored the question. “Open the door, turn right. I’ll follow behind.”

  Illarion’s eyes glinted through the mask. “I trust those daggers won’t end up in my back.”

  “That depends.” She snaked past him, weaving her way from one corridor to the next, until they came to the staircase at the end of the hall. The door was chained, the ward deserted. A fine gray dust powdered the railings along the wall.

  “On what?” He used his sword to untangle the chain, wincing as it clanged against the door. Elena caught the slack on the chain and pulled it taut.

  “On whether you do something stupid like that. Are you trying to give us away?” She yanked the scarf down to cover the fringe of hair on her forehead. “Maybe you are. How do I know you have a sister in the Plague Wing? My father’s been driven mad by this place; it could be his madness that trusts you.”

  Illarion jerked the links of the chain apart with a powerful thrust of his sword. Gathering the length of chain in his hands, he looped it around his waist. They slipped through the door, leaving behind traces of their passage in the dust. They couldn’t avoid it; they had to press ahead.

  “Don’t tell me about your time in Jaslyk and we won’t talk about my sister, agreed? And in terms of your father—” He glanced at her over his shoulder, taking the lead again. “I was a student of Mudjadid’s before he fell into the Authoritan’s hands. So were all the members of the Salikhate.”

  He was moving so swiftly, his movements rhythmic and powerful, that she was panting with the effort to keep up.

  “That’s not the way. There’s a full patrol stationed at the main door. We have to come through the laboratory.”

  She broke away from him, crossing a much wider hallway filled with broken pallets and twisted metal implements. A peculiar scent assailed her nostrils—a chemical odor mixed with the metallic sweetness of blood. This was underlined by the tang of something unfamiliar and unpleasant. She found herself gagging at the smell.

  Illarion caught up to her. He grabbed one of the gas masks from a pallet on the floor and passed it over. “You haven’t been here before. You’ll need this.”

  Still gagging, she grabbed the mask from him and fitted it over her head, tying her scarf at her neck. They stared at each other, their disembodied voices floating through the masks.

  “You’ll need the amulet. It opens the laboratory doors as well.”

  The pipes in the ward began to gurgle. A hollow banging punctuated the hissing of the pipes. Illarion drew the amulet out of its hiding place. He moved to the thick-paned windows that provided a glimpse of activity in the Plague Wing. Gas-masked men in long black smocks prowled between dozens of occupied beds. At the far end of the ward, the room opened off to another space, occupied by hundreds of the beds.

  At the opposite end, closer to Illarion and Elena, a tall bronze door was sealed so air couldn’t pass from one chamber to the next. Three stacked circles were stamped onto the door in a faded bleary crimson.

  Though Elena was familiar with the tunnels that connected the wings of Jaslyk, she’d never been beyond the tall bronze door. She assumed Illarion’s sister was one of the twisted near-corpses in the dozens of narrow beds or in the giant workroom beyond.

  She choked back a sudden stab of despair. What if she’d ended up in the Plague Wing? The Technologist’s personal attentions had been difficult enough to bear, but the women she could see on the cots were grossly misshapen, their limbs bent, their skin mottled, their eyes bulging from their sockets. Each was a symptom of the Technologist’s experiments with the plague: there were others as hideous and cruel.

  One of the occupants of the beds reared up against the chains that bound her, her malformed head lolling toward the door. A red-and-white froth bubbled from her mouth. She raised a manacled hand to the door.

  Illarion pulled Elena away from the window just in time to avoid being seen by one of the plague doctors. He spoke a soothing formula through his gas mask and the prisoner on the bed subsided.

  Elena didn’t want to push Illarion, but she had
to. Every minute was costly. “Is your sister one of them?”

  Illarion shook his head. Elena gestured roughly at the tall bronze door.

  “Is she on the other side? I didn’t think that door led anywhere.”

  “It doesn’t,” Illarion said. “Not to anything that lives. It’s the door to the waste disposal system. Human waste disposal.”

  Elena’s hand hesitated on the outer door. She remembered the strange odor. “Incineration? Do they burn plague victims there?”

  Illarion looked away, pressing the amulet between his hands. He examined the lock on the door—a cavity indented by numerical markings. He placed the bronze amulet into the depression.

  “Not incineration,” he told her. “They liquefy the dead behind that door. They use the liquid to refine their poisons. If you weren’t sent here, you were lucky.”

  Elena’s eyes went blank behind the mask. Her time in Jaslyk was a closed subject; she didn’t intend to discuss it with Illarion.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked.

  “Take out the doctors,” he said. “Let me search for my sister.”

  He turned the dial of the amulet until its numbers aligned with the markings on the depression. Then he pressed it down. The door gave way. Elena didn’t hesitate. She leapt into the room, her knives coming alive in her hands, flashing between the pallets, stabbing through the plague doctors’ smocks, slashing the hoses at the back of their necks.

  She’d reached nearly all of them when from the corner of her eye, she saw Illarion sprint past her to the wider chamber beyond. He didn’t stay to help her, diagnosing that the doctors posed no threat to her skillful use of her knives. He was right. One by one, the plague doctors fell, but before her knife caught the last one, he staggered to the wall and into the minzar’s searchlight. He raised both hands in warning before he slumped to his knees.

  The searchlights swept back to the Plague Wing, trapping Elena in a hot burst of light.

  “Salikhate!” she called. She followed him into the other chamber, keeping her gaze from the misshapen figures on the beds. “The Crimson Watch know we’re here!”

  If she’d thought he’d abandoned her, she was wrong. There were a dozen doctors in the larger chamber, and two of these were making their way to the main doors of the Plague Wing. Illarion was engaged with the rest—puncturing their masks with blunt thrusts of his sword, stabbing others where they attended the women in the beds.

  Elena chased down the pair headed for the doors. She caught the first with a knife in his back, the second against the door. But she was too late. His pounding fists alerted the soldiers on the other side.

  “Elena!”

  She wheeled around in time to catch the chain Illarion had looped around his waist. He didn’t need to tell her. She used the chain to secure the door, knowing the glass was too thick for the Ahdath to break with their swords.

  But the chain wouldn’t hold for long against the weight of their strength.

  Paying no heed to what Illarion was doing, she sprinted back to the antechamber. Her hands fastened on the amulet in the door and yanked it from its cavity. The doors closed behind her, locking them inside the Plague Wing. She raced back to the other room to jam the doors. If she could insert it into the depression on the inside of the doors, she could prevent the Ahdath from unlocking the main entrance to the room.

  She saw them on the other side of the door, each gathering up a gas mask. Her fingers clumsy and sweating, she jammed the amulet into the cavity, twisting it counterclockwise. As she’d hoped, the mechanism on the outer door failed. Now it wasn’t a matter of breaking the interlocked links of the chain. The Ahdath needed a way to rework the amulet’s mechanism.

  But her actions were not enough to save them. She had locked Illarion and herself in a wing full of plague victims, barring the only way out. And the entrance from the rear could be breached by the use of a second amulet. From the shouts of the Ahdath beyond the door, she knew they’d reached the same conclusion. Men were dispatched to find the Warden.

  Illarion had reached the far wall when the searchlights swept the room again. He was going from bed to bed, turning the plague victims over. Would he recognize his sister like this?

  Elena forced herself to look at the women chained to the beds. Not all of them were as deformed as the women in the antechamber. These women were in the early stages of the disease; they hadn’t experienced blindness or the wasting of their flesh.

  “What does she look like?” Elena shouted, running to the opposite end of Illarion’s row, working her way toward him.

  He waved a hand at his hair and face. “Like me. She has a scar above her left eyebrow.”

  Elena moved quickly, skipping over the women with dark hair, turning over the rest. The women’s eyes were blank—they were either drugged or had been blinded by the disease, she couldn’t tell. Their faces were screwed up in pain, their limbs warped within their chains. It was a terrible sight, worse than what the Technologist had done to Elena.

  As she proceeded down the row, neither she nor Illarion found his sister. They moved to the next row, then the next. The fifth row farthest from the wall, less than a third of the way down, Elena found a pale-haired woman with a jagged red line just above her eyebrow. Though her face was twisted in lines of pain, Elena could tell she was just a girl.

  “Salikhate—here.”

  He hurried to her side, taking the girl into his arms. He pushed back the cloudy hair that drifted over her forehead. It came loose in his hands, leaving her scalp partly bald. Ripping off his gloves, he traced the scar above her brow with gentle fingers.

  Alarms went off in the Plague Wing. The Ahdath had brought a battering ram. As soon as they destroyed the amulet, they would be through to the chamber.

  “Illarion,” she muttered, using his name. “Hurry. Whatever it is you’re going to do, do it.” She raised one of the girl’s twisted arms, showing him the chain. He ignored her.

  “Lilia,” he murmured softly, keeping his agony at the sight of his sister from his voice. “Lilia, it’s me. It’s Illarion, your brother.”

  The girl didn’t stir in his arms. Elena pushed back a strand of her hair to uncover her ears. She whispered a forgotten prayer when she saw Lilia’s ears were undamaged.

  The amulet snapped free with a sharp pinging sound. The Ahdath rammed the door. With their second attempt, the chain looping the door’s handles started to come undone.

  “Illarion. We can’t stand against them all.”

  He came back to himself with a jolt. “Find her a gas mask,” he urged. “And get her to the door we came from.”

  Elena cast a frantic glance back to the antechamber. “We can’t get out that way. Ahdath followed our trail. They’ll be here any second.”

  “The gas mask,” he insisted. “Trust me, Elena. I know what I’m doing.”

  She was risking everything for a man she didn’t trust. But she had seen him with his sister, his large hands cradling her face with an inexpressible tenderness. Could a man who would risk his own safety for his sister be capable of such deceit? She found the mask, fitted it to Lilia, and used her dagger to work the manacles free. She jerked the girl’s limbs straight, hoisting her across her shoulder.

  The girl had been starved of everything except the Technologist’s drugs—she was weightless on Elena’s back. Elena moved away from the beds where other women were stirring, their pleading eyes turned to hers. She heard the sibilant sound of Illarion drawing his sword from its sheath. There were Ahdath coming at them from both sides of the Plague Wing now.

  “Illarion,” she said. “There’s no other way out.”

  He raised his sword high and aimed it at the black pipes that ran along the walls of the Plague Wing.

  “Are your masks sealed?”

  Wide-eyed and fearful, she nodded. “Illarion, what—?”

  The chain on the main doors snapped, bearing the battering ram into the room with the force of the Ahdath’s momentum
.

  Illarion’s sword crashed down, severing the pipes. Ten feet away, the unmasked members of the Crimson Watch grasped at their throats with their hands. Illarion backed away, grabbing Elena’s wrist and pulling her along in his wake. He threw cots and pallets in the Ahdath’s way, slowing down the handful of soldiers who were masked.

  “This way!” he shouted.

  But there was nowhere to retreat to, even in the antechamber. The rear doors had been breached by another group of soldiers. A bilious yellow gas rose from the ruptured pipes, rising like a haze in the room.

  The women on the beds choked and sputtered, blood spewing from their mouths as their bodies twisted like grotesqueries. Those of the Ahdath who were unmasked experienced the same symptoms. A handful of others pursued Elena and Illarion into the antechamber, stumbling over bodies and beds.

  Illarion threw his weight against the heavy bronze door. It needed no amulet to open.

  The horrifying odor of liquefaction permeated the wing. This close to it, Elena choked at the stench. Her knees buckled, Lilia falling with her. Illarion grabbed her in time. He pulled Elena to her feet, shifting his sister’s weight onto his own shoulders. Keeping hold of Elena’s hand, he dove into the gas-filled chamber, pulling her past giant steel vats that bubbled with ghastly purpose.

  “Don’t look,” he warned, yanking her forward.

  She couldn’t. She was too busy putting one foot in front of the other without retching inside her mask. She felt a tug from behind. An Ahdath grappled at the hose of her mask. Focusing on the immediate danger, she buried her knife in his shoulder.

  As soon as his flesh was rent, the blood in his arm began to foam. He fell back. Elena disappeared into the growing fog in Illarion’s footsteps.

  “Don’t leave me here,” she choked through the mask, anxious for his reassurance.

  His mask bobbed in her direction. “Don’t worry, Anya. You still owe me for the Gold House, and I promised to collect.”

  She followed him through the haze. Behind her, choking sounds mingled with the susurrant ripple of liquefaction. Head down, she blundered ahead until they came to another door. This one was sealed from the outside. Illarion tried to budge it without success. It was the door that led to the courtyard. He shifted his sister to the ground. Freeing up his sword, he tried to break through the seal. There was no space to wedge his sword into the frame.