The Black Khan

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  Rukh turned to Arian. “What hope can you offer me without the Bloodprint?”

  And he found himself waiting as trustingly for her answer as any of the Warraqeen.

  “We’ll do what we can to hold the city. Your army is legendary, my lord. With the Talisman’s ignorance of tactics, the Zhayedan will hold your walls for many a night after this.”

  A look passed between Arian and Sinnia, a quick question and a tightening of lips in response. Rukh caught it, his brief flare of hope quashed. “Tell me all of it. I would know what Ashfall faces.”

  “Did you see what transpired at the western gate? Did you witness the One-Eyed Preacher?”

  Rukh nodded. “I’d seen something similar at a Talisman trap upon the road to Ashfall. But does that mean the Preacher is a creature of dark magic? Formless yet all-powerful?”

  “I cannot be sure what he is. An apparition? An enlargement of himself, perhaps achieved by his knowledge of the Claim. If so, he creates this form of himself from a knowledge of necromancy that none of us possess.”

  Rukh prodded Wafa. “But you, boy. You saw a man?”

  Of them all, only Wafa grieved Darya openly, his pointed face streaked with tears, his blue eyes wide with suffering. He struggled to find his voice. “Yes, a man. A man with a tall turban and a black patch over his eye. His voice was like a storm.”

  “So he is mortal.”

  A burning desire for vengeance raged inside Rukh’s thoughts. He needed it and he would use it, no matter what else he lost. The One-Eyed Preacher would be forced to answer for the murder of the Princess. For Darya, who had never found her place at her brother’s serpentine court. And in a sudden fit of jealousy, he wondered why Arsalan had sought Darya’s anklets for himself. And why there was no one he could speak to of the things that damaged him most.

  Unless the First Oralist had softened toward him now …

  He felt the harsh sting of self-contempt. Even in death, he sought to use his sister as a pawn.

  But Arian was at the window, watching the Talisman retreat, seeing the small explosions that dotted their camp, a frown etched between the winged line of her brows.

  “He wanted the Bloodprint. All this”—she gestured at the Talisman vanguard and the main army appearing around the fringes of the salt lake—“all this was for the Bloodprint. Now that he has it, his legitimacy is assured. He will wield it like a hammer, bringing Khorasan under his rule.”

  For a moment her despair matched the Black Khan’s. Wafa looked at them, feeling lost. He’d picked up Darya’s hand, and cold though it was, he clasped it in his own for comfort, sensing whatever temporary safety he’d found would soon crash down around his ears.

  The Khan’s words echoed his bleak thoughts. “Then Ashfall is doomed, no matter what the Zhayedan accomplish on the field.”

  Sinnia broke into their conversation with a cough. “I don’t know who the Preacher is or where he came from.” She gave an elaborate shrug of her shoulders. “So he knows a few tricks with the Claim.” She nodded at Arian. “So did the Authoritan, if you recall, and in the end, he collapsed into dust. Lania did that,” she stressed. “If Lania could do it with such scant knowledge of the Claim, think of what we can do, Arian. Our power is barely tapped.” A throbbing self-assurance filled her voice.

  “We do not have the Bloodprint—it is now in the hands of the Preacher.” Yet Arian’s protest was token, a faint possibility taking root in her thoughts.

  As if hearing Arian’s lack of conviction, Sinnia pressed on. “The Preacher will need time for study. The Bloodprint will not relinquish the secrets of the Claim all at once. It will require patience. We learned that for ourselves.” Sinnia approached the Black Khan, placing his sword in his hand. “Do you concede before the battle? That is not our way in the lands of the Negus.” A graceful gesture of her arm dismissed the Talisman’s forces. “There is only an army to fight, my lord. Surely, you do not quail before it?”

  Another explosion sounded in the Talisman camp. Sinnia’s great dark eyes narrowed. “We would seem to have an ally.”

  “Indeed you do.” A new voice spoke, cool and strangely distorted.

  Sinnia looked to the door. A stranger in black approached, his hair covered, his features hidden by his mask. He strode down the length of the room to Darya’s body. He made a brief bow before the Companions.

  “First Oralist. Lady Sinnia.” A cold smile glinted through the mask. “Yes, and you, the useful boy.”

  Arian examined his mask, astonished that she couldn’t read its script—yet struck by something all the same: a mercurial familiarity, as if they’d both been tested by the raging fires of the Claim. “Do I know you, messenger of the Khan?”

  The mask turned toward her. “Our paths have crossed many times, First Oralist, but we have never met. Unless you have had need for the services of an assassin?”

  Rukh interrupted before Arian could puzzle this through. “You return just in time, Hasbah. Are the fires in the Talisman camp evidence of your work?”

  “My men do what they can to purchase grace for a night.”

  “What do you foresee for us?”

  “Not the defeat you expect.”

  The Black Khan laid back his ears like a cat. “Why is that? Are you not aware that the Preacher has taken the Bloodprint?”

  The man known as the Assassin bowed low. He placed both of his gloved hands on Darya’s bier, spreading his fingers apart as if he rested his weight upon them.

  “The Preacher will need time for study, especially as he has murdered so many of those who read.”

  Sinnia looked gratified by the Assassin’s reinforcement of her conclusions. “You can win the field, my lord. But the Talisman will return.”

  “Then how do I defeat them? My powers were of no use to me. Will you pursue the Preacher to win back the Bloodprint for me? Anything you ask for would be yours.”

  For a moment the Assassin’s eyes slipped to the unmoving form on the bier. “I have searched,” he admitted. “But I cannot discover the Preacher’s origins or the place he considers his nest. I fear you must abandon any further pursuit of the Bloodprint.”

  The Black Khan looked the Assassin over from head to toe. He didn’t have the look of a man who was bringing his Khan dangerously hopeless news. All his senses alert, Rukh leaned forward over the bier to within a hairsbreadth of the Assassin’s mask.

  The Assassin’s silver laces were missing from his elbow-length gloves. “When I left the walls, I did not see the red-bearded Immolan at the gate.” The Assassin flexed his fingers. “Because he is dead,” he said modestly.

  Arian caught her breath, the sound audible in the quiet room. “And the Silver Mage?” she asked.

  The Assassin directed his answer at Rukh. “It is the Silver Mage I come to you about. I told you of the Conference of the Mages.”

  Rukh rocked back on his heels. “I’m unskilled as Dark Mage, as you well know. I’ve had that proved to me again. And even if there was a possibility of it, the Silver Mage is lost and the High Companion is at Hira.”

  “Not so.” The Assassin dropped the words into the silence. “My men bring her to you as we speak. The Golden Mage shall be here soon, and the Silver Mage is alive. My assassins are searching for him. They will see him restored to your walls.”

  Desperate to believe, Arian moved to Rukh’s side, facing the Assassin. “How do you know this to be true?”

  A peculiar twist to his lips, the Assassin reached into a pocket under his hood. He opened his palms, displaying a small object that played a brilliant light over his gloves.

  Wafa gasped aloud. It was the ring of the Silver Mage. He reached out to touch it and the Assassin closed his fist with uncanny speed.

  Wafa ran to Sinnia. She gathered him to her side, slicing a look of disdain at the Assassin to hide how his swiftness had stunned her. “You seem to know a great deal about the Silver Mage,” she said warily.

  “We’ve met.” He made an unwarranted bo
w to Arian. “In another guise, I sold him a manuscript in the stalls of Maze Aura.”

  That fleeting chord of recognition moved through Arian again. “Were you sent to Black Aura by His Excellency?”

  Impenetrable eyes gleamed at her through the mask. “I was.”

  “Did I see you in the audience at the Ark?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “No, I would have remembered. It was at Hira that I saw you.”

  “Perhaps I told the High Companion there was something of merit at the Sorrowsong.”

  Mystified, Arian fell silent. The Assassin was showing her a nexus—the points of connection on her Audacy, connections he couldn’t know anything about.

  She heard Daniyar’s voice telling her about a manuscript, one he had purchased in Maze Aura. It described the attributes of the One as found in the Verse of the Throne.

  A chill settled in her bones. Who was this man?

  Rukh’s voice cut across her thoughts. “Three Mages at Ashfall—what then, my friend? Without the most experienced of our kind, the Mage of the Blue Eye, what is it you claim we can achieve?”

  The answer came in a single word. “Mastery.”

  Rukh glowered at him. “This is no time for your riddles. Speak plainly, Hasbah.”

  The Assassin stared down at the ring he held in his palm, shifting it this way and that, until for a moment its silver light arrowed through his mask, illuminating his face.

  Sinnia sucked in a breath. His face was the face of a monster. Yet something about it was familiar. The light winked away, and the brief illusion disappeared.

  “You will have mastery over everything. These walls. Their army. And of course—” Here he bowed again to the Companions. Then his gaze dwelt once more on Darya’s still face. “I would think you’d be pleased to rout the Talisman without asking for anything more.”

  “And if the Preacher returns once he has mastered the Bloodprint? I know of no magic to withstand him.” The Black Khan’s attempt at sorcery weighted his voice with gloom. He had failed at everything he’d tried.

  The Assassin moved to the Black Throne, withdrawing a scroll from his satchel. He laid it on the seat of the throne, holding it down with Daniyar’s ring. “But I do, Excellency, and as I do, you have nothing to fear.”

  A black-gloved hand beckoned Arian. “Do you recognize this scroll, First Oralist?”

  Arian peered at the scroll but kept her distance from the Assassin. A gruesome aura of death emanated from his armor.

  Her eyes widened at the sight of the parchment delicately inscribed with ink.

  It was the green mirror—the Verse of the Throne—a page from the missing Bloodprint.

  She had last held it in her hands in the safehold of the Bloodless, a mausoleum in Black Aura. When she’d returned it to the Bloodless, she’d unlocked the secret of the Bloodprint.

  Concealing her shock, she asked him, “How did this fall into your hands? How is it you found this page of the Bloodprint?”

  The Assassin ran a finger over its graceful green script. He was reading it. Easily. Fluently. And Arian realized something she hadn’t known: this deadly assassin was literate.

  “Sahabiya,” he said, “this folio is not from the Bloodprint.”

  “Explain yourself,” the Black Khan interrupted. “It cannot be other than the Bloodprint. And all we have is this page, while the Preacher has the manuscript entire.”

  Gloating a little, the Assassin dipped his head at Arian. “Think, sahabiya. Think of what you know.” His glance enfolded Sinnia. “Think of what you both know, what you witnessed in the scriptorium.”

  Sinnia edged closer. Her time in the scriptorium had been brief; if he referred to the verses that preceded the Verse of the Throne, she wouldn’t have been able to distinguish them. Her brow puckered, she stared at the scroll, her knuckles white against her skin.

  Arian was examining it as well, her heart thudding an anxious beat. Bewildered, she shook her head. She didn’t understand.

  Life, knowledge, power, dominion, will, and Oneness. It was there in the Verse of the Throne, the most powerful verse of the Claim. Could it stand against the Bloodprint on its own?

  Appearing to read her thoughts, the Assassin shook his head.

  Startling them all, Sinnia let out a cry. “By the fertile lands of the Negus—Arian, don’t you see? This is the green mirror.”

  The Verse of the Throne was inked in green—a color that had outlasted the wars of the Far Range, the destruction of the holy cities, and the Talisman’s ascent. The long lines of its script formed a perfect chiastic structure inked in green.

  The Bloodprint she’d studied twice was written in rusted gold. Its strong, square script was marked in gold, the ink losing its color over time, its original luster lost, the manuscript penned in the same burnt shade.

  “Where is this from?” she said breathlessly. “A suhuf found in a cave?”

  “It’s too beautiful for that, too well preserved.”

  “Then where?”

  The sound of another explosion came to them from behind the walls. It rippled through the square and drifted up to the windows of the war room.

  “There is a reason the Mage of the Blue Eye has forsaken the Conference of the Mages. Tell me, sahabiya—what do you know the Bloodprint to be?”

  Arian answered him with a hint of suspicion: “The oldest-known record of the Claim.”

  “Transcribed in the ninth century before the wars of the Far Range? Perhaps the tenth?” the Assassin mused. “Yet what if I told you there is another, even older? Unmarked by holy blood—as clear as the day it was written by a well-schooled, devoted hand.”

  “Nothing of the old world survives.” Sinnia’s words rang out like a bell in the sudden silence of the war room. She spoke with the sure knowledge afforded a Companion of Hira.

  But even as Sinnia made the claim, stars flickered behind Arian’s eyes. A wild, improbable hope flared up in her thoughts. The words meant nothing to Sinnia and Rukh, but she had been trained at Hira. She knew its histories by heart.

  “What can you mean, Assassin?”

  The Assassin dared to touch her, brushing one of his gloves against her shoulder. “You know what I mean, First Oralist. Will you tell them, or shall I?”

  For a moment, Arian was lost in contemplation of the parchment on the seat of the throne. The Verse of the Throne she’d thought of as a green mirror. A sudden strength in her voice, she said, “There was an older manuscript written by a woman’s hand, the woman who first collected the scattered verses of the Claim. She was a Companion of Hira—she was known to us as Hafsah.”

  “Hafsah?” Sinnia echoed, the name unfamiliar.

  “Half-Seen,” Arian said with certainty. “Half-Seen, the Collector.”

  The Assassin picked up his tale, oblivious to the fading sounds of battle beyond the city walls.

  “You know the manuscript’s name,” he said to Arian. “And I believe I know its origin.” He nodded at the Verse of the Throne.

  “Do you speak of the Sana Codex?” Arian demanded, outraged that the Assassin would attempt to perpetrate this hoax. Her voice cold, she warned him against the lie. “The Codex was burned in the wars of the Far Range when the holy cities were destroyed.”

  The Assassin was shaking his head. “You were misinformed, First Oralist. It was spirited away to a kingdom of the desert, to the city of Timeback, and there it has remained safe.”

  Indescribable joy warmed Sinnia’s eyes. “Timeback? Timeback is on the border of the lands of the Negus. I have been there in my youth; it’s a wondrous city of the sands.” Her words slowed, a sense of understanding flowing through them. She looked at the Assassin with an air of momentous discovery.

  “The Mage of the Blue Eye,” she said. “Timeback is his city.”

  The Assassin made her a bow. “Just as the Sana Codex is his trust.”

  60

  A FIRE WAS LIT IN A GREAT ROOM EMPTIED OF ITS COURTIERS, TWO BRAZIERS burning
on either side of the Peacock Throne, where Rukh looked down on them with an air of avid attention. The Assassin had never failed him, nor had he ever lied. If he spoke of the Sana Codex as a fact, then its existence would prove to be real.

  He studied the weary faces of the Companions. The Cataphracts were making fresh incursions into the enemy. Arsalan was at the wall with Cassandane’s archers. They had taken losses, but not as many as they would have without the Assassin’s men dotted about the Talisman encampment. He didn’t know how the Assassins carried out their legendary tactics; he was only grateful that they did.

  There was still no sign of the Silver Mage, but messenger hawks relayed news of the High Companion. Soon he would call the Conference of the Mages; his dark powers would be awakened. Then he would send out his forces to cut the Talisman down.

  For the first time since his bedevilment in his chambers, he felt a small spark of hope. If the Preacher returned to his walls, the Companions would stand against him with the Sana Codex in hand. If they would journey to Timeback and retrieve the Codex for themselves—a journey full of dangers with no promise of success at the end.

  Watching Arian’s face, he asked, “What have you decided to do?”

  “Whatever I must.”

  She spoke in a voice whose clarity still beguiled his senses, and though he would hate to lose her, she had never been his to lose. As the Silver Mage had warned him, Arian belonged to herself.

  His hungry eyes searched her face, wanting to keep her by his side. “You have your conditions, I imagine.”

  She gave him a frank glance from between her lashes and he felt his heart seize up. How could he have thought to harm her?

  “Tell me,” he said, his voice rough.

  “I must speak to the High Companion. If I am to leave for Timeback, I must be discharged from my quest to seek after the Bloodprint.” A grimace twisted her lips. “Otherwise, I must set out after the One-Eyed Preacher.”

  “A pointless quest. Trust me to convince the High Companion the time has come to yield.”

  He believed the word of the Assassin, whom he’d sent to assist in the search for the Silver Mage. He also knew nothing would please Ilea more than to send Arian beyond the Empty Quarter. “What else?”